A6, 56 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

Over four short years, DOWSER has aggregated a partial history in free-floating fragments and interpreted a present moment equally unreconcilable. It might long continue in these respects quite happily, never reaching a place called comprehensive, but to do so whilst sustaining a fair economy for contributors, regularity, and editorial attention was never an expectation.

For the final utterance of this publishing project, it felt necessary to face forward. Where do we go from here? How does a place like Scotland figure as a frame, a restraint, or an immutable context? What do artists, indeed all people, need to work and live in a way that’s conducive to knowledge production? Dispersing the unenviable task of speculation, DOWSER Issue 10 (Autumn 2024) convenes a roundtable of trusted thinkers in artist-filmmakers Margaret Salmon, Tako Taal and producer Mason Leaver-Yap. Based in Scotland yet working internationally, they share a political commitment to the moving image as a means to commune.

Borrowed from Salmon for the title of this discussion, Working Nearby hopes to conjure a sense of the proximity and interdependence that underwrites it all: the making, showing, seeing and thinking of moving image work. Bringing collaborators not limited to peers, friends, subjects and audiences together through socialised approaches to production and exhibition, Salmon, Taal and Leaver-Yap offer a counter-ask in how we might model collectivity, for just one evening in a darkened room, or an entire lifetime.

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