The publication “EL PLIEGO / LE PLI / A FOLDER” reflects the experience of the international exchange project, graphical interaction and edition, coordinated by Ana Soler and Anne Heyvaert under the same title. This project aims to continue promoting cross-border cultural circulation that allows graphic editing, multiplication, versatility and portability, thus revaluing the book format from its base module, the fold.

The folder consists of an entire space divided into four distinct and supportive spaces in which opposition, reflexivity, adjacency and sequencing relations are established.

Just like a book, the folder can be opened and closed, saved, displayed, and concealed at the same time. Binding the different folders together gives rise to a book, a device defined by that emergency and encounter zone, the fold, understood as the folding hinge.

In this teaching and research project, each participant is invited to intervene on a sheet of paper folded in 2 (4 parts including front and back) through the implicit binomial “Twice unfolded”, using graphic techniques and/or other resources that generate multiple images for publishing multiple copies. Therefore, a selection of students, teachers and artists linked to graphic art and editing studios and research groups from different universities and training centres were brought together.

In this project, each centre first sends its set of selected and edited folders to the organising centre (dx5 group, Faculty of Fine Arts, Pontevedra, Spain). The works received are then compiled into as many books as centres participating in the project. Each book is comprised of different unsewn booklets that are compiled together in a common cover-container designed by the organising centre. This flexible format permits different combinations, in the form of an exquisite corpse, and facilitates future exhibition of independent folders at each centre.

224 folders were finally collected from 17 training and research centres in 11 different countries from Europe, America and Asia.
This project provides continuity to the previous projects”La Miniatura” (2010-12), “Comptines, Rhymes for the World” (2014-15), and proposes to renew the participating centres by incorporating new collaborators.