Located on a former industrial site in the Sitter Valley, on the outskirts of the city of St. Gallen is the Sitterwerk Foundation — a non-profit research center and archive which provides public access to the knowledge shared between materials, art, craft and production processes. The way its resources are arranged, however, is partly up to you.
This essay is part of Issue #2 “Fair Play”, a series curated by KoozArch.
The Sitterwerk Foundation is embedded in a lively and productive environment in the direct neighborhood of the Kesselhaus Josephson and the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen — the art foundry — a site for art production, operating on site since 1992. Actually everything started with the art foundry which, parallel to its commercial work, has also launched several non-commercial cultural initiatives. These were brought together under one roof as the Sitterwerk Foundation in 2006. Now, it comprises an art library with roughly 30,000 books on the topics of art, architecture, design, photography, and production, as well as a material archive with a collection of material samples from art production, restoration, architecture, and design. The Foundation also includes a studio building for international art residencies.
“Fair play” comes into the game at various levels in the Sitter Valley – a place where fundamental social questions have been tested in everyday life for 30 years in the context of art, craft, material and economic reality and research.
“Fair play” comes into the game at various levels in the Sitter Valley – a place where fundamental social questions have been tested in everyday life for 30 years in the context of art, craft, material and economic reality and research.From collating the physical world of things in an immense collection of materials to new forms of collaboration and climate-neutral energy generation from the river power plant located on the site, steps towards transformation and cultural change are taken here every day.
The notion of fair play is central to the Sitterwerk Foundation not only in terms of values and operations, but also conceptually. The dynamic ordering system of the art library, for example, deserves a closer look when we talk about playing fair.
The books in the art library are not organised thematically, chronologically or alphabetically; rather library users can use the books freely and put them back on shelves wherever they like. The books have no signs, but instead each book has a radio frequency identification or RFID tag attached inside. An RFID reading antenna slides along the shelves and scans the tag of each book every night, and thus transmits the current location of each book to the digital catalogue on a daily basis. As a result of this system, it is possible for the books to be arranged in various contexts and to wander through the collection without the hegemony of topical organisation.
In this sense, the library adapts to its users, who can create their own subjective-specific or associative arrangements on the shelves. New possibilities for searching for and finding books arise. The way in which books are currently grouped on the shelves facilitates so-called serendipitous discoveries: while searching outa particular book, one finds others that one was not necessarily looking for, but might nevertheless be or become of interest.
The library adapts to its users, who can create their own subjective-specific or associative arrangements on the shelves. New possibilities for searching for and finding books arise.
In terms of fair play, the dynamic order of the Art Library is an interesting model — also valid in a broader context — for testing new forms of knowledge production beyond established categories. On this basis, another tool was developed in 2014 in cooperation with partners: the Werkbank (workbench). By means of RFID technology, the workbench is able to capture the books and material samples equipped with RFID tags that are lying on the table and to depict them in a digital interface. This makes it possible to save the analogue compilation of books and materials that have been brought together while doing research in a digital work environment, allowing a curated or aggregated set of materials to be saved and developed later: materials, books, one’s own pictures, documents, or notes are combined, can be shared, commented on and supplemented, and produce new personal connections to other objects in the collection. The workbench is thus a research tool that enables users to compare their own search results with the books and materials currently on display, as well as with the groupings in which these objects have been consulted by other library users.
In terms of fair play, the dynamic order of the Art Library is an interesting model for testing new forms of knowledge production beyond established categories.
The results of each search can be viewed as a digital document with notes added by the user; it can even be printed on paper, and bound in the formof a booklet — a so-called Bibliozine. It is possible to order one’s own research post facto, in a template and then to perhaps supplement it with additional commentaries.
Bibliozine. Photo: Katalin Deér.
We strive to address structures of order and hierarchies at their roots and not only on a theoretical level — thus to comprehend the library and the collection as an open system that takes up current and social concerns.
At the Sitterwerk Foundation,we thus strive to address structures of order and hierarchies at their roots and not only on a theoretical level — thus to comprehend the library and the collection as an open system that takes up current and social concerns. By giving more power to the library user in ordering and annotating contents, by means of the dynamic order or the workbench, we try to pursue a more open understanding of an archive, which operates less with fixed categories and more with context.
Text by Barbara Biedermann.
Bio
The aim of the non-profit Sitterwerk Foundation is to operate and further develop a public center for art and production on the grounds of the former Textilfärberei Sitterthal (textile dying plant) in St.Gallen. The Sitterwerk Foundation includes the Art Library, the Material Archive, and the Studio House for guest artists. Felix Lehner, Hans Jörg Schmid, and Daniel Rohner established the foundation in 2006. At irregular intervals, the foundation organises exhibitions, workshops and conferences on the topics of books, material culture and alternative knowledge organisation.
