Xingyun Shen: Will You Bring Your Book to dblspce

Will You Bring Your Book to dblspce is a place-specific publication that documents the marginalia collected in June 2024 during Xingyun’s residency at dblspce, Singapore exploring the proximity and situatedness of collective reading. For four weeks, Will You Bring Your Book was a marginalia-curious communal library with an invitation to bring any text-based material they wished to read and annotate with others. Visitors brought textbooks, novels, publications, handmade zines, photocopied texts, manuals, comics, and fan fiction, and read along with each other. Here, along with, refers not only to the gathering of reading bodies but also the collision of reading minds that meet in the margins of pages via marginalia.  This collection of contextual marginalia makes public a multiplicity of knowledge by whiting out primary texts and leaving only marginalia in the page spaces. These spaces, filled with personalised annotations differentiated through various penmanship, become sites for collective reflection and conversation-making. This publication asks, “How can marginalia become a vehicle for space-making for individuals and their communities?”