Index Teen Advisory Board 25/26

Over the past year, Index Teen Advisory Board (ITAB) has moved through a constellation of encounters, workshops, conversations, and experiments as they have worked on contributions for a publication in collaboration with PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board (Oslo) and PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board (Helsinki). What began as a question about how young people might claim space in art institutions grew into an inquiry into how we act together, speak together, and practice agency within shared structures. In addition to our monthly meetings, ITAB has regularly met with the other boards across the Nordics in online workshops on publishing practices led by the book’s editor, Gerrie van Noord, and its designer, Tuukka Kaila.

Our first site visit took place at Munnen, a community space in the Stockholm suburb Bagarmossen where publishing is approached as a way of living together. Surrounded by zines, books and the enduring question “can a soup be published?”, we considered our roles as readers and decision-makers, and mapped what sparks curiosity. These maps formed the basis of a shared methodology: thinking collectively and allowing interests to emerge organically.

We then turned our attention to the future, specifically the year 2125. Imagining books as bodies, rituals, or grown rather than printed objects, we asked what knowledge they might carry and what forms of authorship could exist beyond today’s system. These speculations became a way of questioning what publishing allows, and what kinds of agency might be reclaimed from structures that flatten or automate our voices.

A visit to graphic designer and artist Sara Kaaman deepened this inquiry. Her practice, moving through performance and printed matter, proposed the book as a performative body. In her roleplay Oraklets ark, letting go of linear time suggested that authorship can also mean releasing control, and allowing stories to emerge through relation and vulnerability.

In a workshop with artist and dramaturg Ruby Nilsson, we explored how cutting, rearranging, and collectively rewriting text can challenge the structures we inherit. Through exercises in transforming existing material, we confronted how much of what we produce is already shaped by established forms and how collective methods can open space for resistance.

In October, ITAB met with the PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board and PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board for the Future Futures Conference at PUBLICS in Helsinki. This year’s conference centred on books, writing, publishing practices, and archives in relation to the visual arts. Together, the boards visited initiatives such as Trans Library Helsinki, the Library of the Labour Movements, and the open screenprint workspace Kalasataman Seripaja with its adjoining Paja Gallery, expanding our shared understanding of how publishing operates across different contexts.

This year’s explorations crystallised into guiding questions: What are the futures of publishing? How do young people practice agency in systems shaped by institutional gatekeeping, commercial and extractivist interests, and uneven access to visibility? How might publications travel across borders, or even dimensions?

The final contributions grew from these questions. Vilhelm Rosenström Domeij and Dylan Murray conducted interviews with Shoebox Magazine and Offensiv. Tiffany Olafson and Dylan Murray wrote a cut-up text simulating the mutating logic of generative AI through analogue means. The script for Oraklets ark, alongside a parallel narrative by Moa Zhang and Mila Frances, with illustrations by Diane Nozynska, treated authorship as an ongoing negotiation. The artist and graphic designer falk olavi schröter illustrated a comic, developed from Kiara Eifert’s and Elin Karlsson’s script and influenced by Ruby Nilsson’s workshop, shows how ideas shift through many hands.

Throughout the publication, boundaries between ITAB’s work and commissioned pieces remain deliberately fluid. This porousness is a method: agency emerges from shaping conditions for participation and allowing multiple forms of knowledge to coexist.

Each contribution carries traces of shared conversations, disagreement, and moments of uncertainty, and joy. Like the imagined books of 2125, the publication invites reading not only as an object but as a living practice that expands what publishing can become when young people claim the tools, the time, and the space to shape it on their own terms.

This year, we have also introduced a monthly gathering for young people to read, think and talk about contemporary art together – a place for shared exploration. Each session engages different types of texts related to art; poems, short stories, artists’ writing, exhibition texts, or art theory. So far, they have included close readings of Johnny Chang & Louise Nassiri, “Floating in the White Sea: A Foray Into the Contemporary Art Institution” (2018), Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), Susan Sontag, “On Plato’s Cave”, Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (2011), Kathy Acker, “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body” (1993), Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1977) and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978), and David Wojnarowicz, ”Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12–Inch–Tall Politician” (1990).

Index Teen Advisory Board members of 2025 are Mila Frances, Dylan Murray, Moa Zhang, Alice Harling, riddhima rat, Alayna Hassan, Kiara Eifert, Tiffany Olafson, Elin Karlsson, Vilhelm Rosenström Domeij, and Diane Nozynska. They enter the new year preparing for the launch of their publication, set to be released in March at Index.