Whatever paradoxical it may sound, but contemporary publishing industry appears to be experiencing a curious transformation. Over the last five years - accelerated by the pandemic, shifting migration patterns, and ongoing economic and political turbulence - new initiatives have been emerging that challenge traditional notions of where and how books are made. Increasingly, publishing projects are no longer tied to a single city, office, or even country. Editors, designers, authors, and producers may be based in different parts of the world while working collaboratively on the same title.

A special place in this evolving ecosystem is occupied by small (yet ambitious) independent publishers operating as distributed teams. Often without permanent offices or the possibility of regular in-person collaboration, they compensate for limited infrastructure through mobility, digital connectivity, and a readiness for transnational cooperation. What during the pandemic appeared as a forced temporary solution is now an almost organic part of our new reality. One of such initiatives is “Tamaka” - a new Berlin-based publishing house producing books of visual arts, photography, design, and architecture by “exceptional but underrepresented authors,” as they describe on their website.

The name of the publishing project – with the stress on the first syllable – is symbolic in itself and hints at the principles and values “Tamaka” stands for. Drawn from colloquial Belarusian (the team members originally come from Belarus), it means “somewhere, not here”, implying either uncertainty about a precise location or a sense that location itself is no longer what matters

“We guess, the word portrays the state of many Belarusians for the past years, both physical and mental - forced to be somewhere, and often not by their choice,” explains “Tamaka” in a comment for “FORM.” And their own team offers a clear illustration to this condition of placelessness: founders, designers, partners, and authors are all scattered across different parts of Europe and can only meet in person when a book is launched. “So, all of us are somewhere “tamaka”,” fairly summarizes Elena Siamionava, “Tamaka”s co-founder and editor-in-chief.

This paradox, however, is hardly accidental. Publishing, perhaps more than any other cultural practice, has proven capable of adapting to the conditions of migration – whether voluntary or forced. Books indeed can travel when people cannot; they can be assembled across borders, edited remotely, designed in exile, and printed far from their imagined place of origin. Against this backdrop, it is telling that the first photobook “Tamaka” has chosen to make itself heard “elsewhere” (or everywhere?) is itself a project that challenges imposed borders and fixed definitions. It is “Everybody Dance!” – “the debut and manifesto of “Tamaka”, a book focusing on collage as a conceptual artistic practice used by the young but already well-established photographer Masha Sviatahor.

The photobook brings together five series (created in 2018-2025) arranged in both chronological and thematic structure and prefaced by the essay by Maya Hristova, an expert in Eastern European photography. Despite the span of years, the works are united by a rigorously consistent visual language: clear geometric compositions, recurring motifs, and a restrained palette of white, black, gold, and – inevitably – red. All images are assembled from “Sovetskoe Foto,” the only specialist photography magazine published in the Soviet Union between 1926 and 1991. Once a vehicle for optimism, unity, and the idealized “new Soviet person,” those are transformed by Sviatahor into an eerie, distorted mirror that exposes the absurdity and hypocrisy of Soviet ideology. Ironically, back in the late 2010s, the artist got her physical "inspiration" for the future series in a potato sack filled with 150 issues of the magazine from a former photojournalist who had sold them to her through a flea market-type site intended to get rid of this treasure.

Reflecting on the choice of Sviatahor as an artist opening a brand-new chapter of a brand-new printing initiative, I find myself concluding that there could hardly have been a better alternative indeed. Isn’t the need to revisit the past something we all must address in the current moment of history? And art, definitely, is only one of the methods of drafting this revision. In Sviatahor’s work, collage functions as a tool for challenging established narratives through the deconstruction of the country of her childhood; every cut might be interpreted as an invitation to critically reconsider what for decades had been positioned as unquestionable and join a dialogue of memory, history, and imagination.

The whole photobook in a way embodies this ethos: it presents not only finished collages but also traces of their making, turning the act of reading and viewing into a participatory exploration of how fragments can be reassembled into something new, provocative, and deeply personal. The reader is literally invited to co-create (or rather to “co-deconstruct”.)

One of the masterminds behind this witty concept is designer Alexey Murashko, engaged in book design and editing for about two decades. Sharing “Tamaka”s interest in working with Sviatahor as the author of their first publication – partly due to what he describes as the completeness of her creative collage-based artistic phase – Murashko also emphasizes her “holistic approach to the language,” who he characterizes as “consistent” and “coherent.”

“When “Tamaka” started introducing me to potentially interesting artists, for me Masha was definitely number one,” Murashko recalls in a conversation with “FORM”. “I had enough time to approach her works from different perspectives and what truly appealed to me were not so much the topics and plots she dealt with but her externally meticulous approach and her holistic approach to the language. There is a sense of coherence across her earlier series - not monotonous, but consistent - a quality I value deeply in any artistic practice. I’m also drawn to the irony with which she approaches her themes. Over time, I found myself seeing her work differently.”

Yet completeness also was not enough. After all, doesn't almost any book or photobook claim to present something finished? A far more challenging goal Murashko set for himself was to reveal the path towards completion – in this case, the very process leading to the final collage. Together with Sviatahor, he embraced this challenge with curiosity and precision.

Design plays a crucial conceptual role in articulating this position. Central to Murashko’s ambition is the insistence on preserving the materiality of collage: visible cuts, layered surfaces, intriguing paper fibers, and traces of the artist’s physical engagement with the archive material from the state that no longer exists – once powerful but now fragmented and selectively re-examined through a different lenses.

Another conceptual solution worth mentioning in this regard is the use of counterforms - the empty spaces left behind after cutting. In “Everybody Dance!”, they are given a symbolic voice and a prominent place in the composition of the dividers between chapters, gradually accumulating throughout the book as a visual metaphor for labor, subtraction, loss and the emergence of something entirely new.  

The participatory logic also manifests itself in the appearance of a self-adhesive collage placed at the center of the book, cut with the same tools the artist used for the randomly attached cover stickers with iconic ballet dances – an allusion to Swan Lake, repeatedly broadcast on Soviet state television in August 1991 during the coup attempt. Readers are invited to exercise agency and freedom by dismantling and rearranging the image – and, by extension, the reality it once “monumentally” documented as part of a state photographic archive. An invitation, Murashko sadly notes, many hesitate to accept preferring to keep the pages intact.

Yet, the possibility itself is what matters, the very potential of being able to have a choice to take the course of action. And here, in my view, deconstruction moves beyond aesthetics towards an ethical dimension: after all, nothing is what it seems, isn’t it? This is precisely how, in “Everybody Dance!”, ballet dancers cease to be merely graceful women performing refined choreography; flittering through the pages, they transform into an angry, restless living hive - a collective body charged with tension, resistance, and hidden force.

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