A Myriad Marginalia

“We may all be on the same page, but no one is at the center. The margin is everywhere.”
-Raqs Media Collective

Rhode Island School of Design invited Raqs Media Collective to serve as Vikram and Geetanjali Kirloskar Fellows in RISD’s Painting Department. In response, Raqs designed a thirty-day open studio in the RISD Museum centered on marginalia.

A Myriad Marginalia served as an experimental studio that transformed artistic thinking through conversation, collective annotation, and material gathering. The studio investigated the power of margins—just as medieval “marginalists” once filled manuscript edges with profane wisdom, popular proverbs, and fantastical creatures, seeding new ideas at the periphery.

Raqs opened the studio to students, faculty, staff, and museum visitors, inviting everyone to fill its edges and redirect fringe ideas toward the center. By keeping its doors wide open, the studio fostered dialogue and discovery—allowing peripheral notes, sketches, and insights to surface and guiding participants from the margins into the core of collective inquiry.

Participants cultivated an attentiveness that sought out and decoded what hid at the margins. Together with Raqs, they constructed a “myriad marginal manuscript.” Through workshops, dialogues, and collective inquiry, the studio assembled a dynamic body of artistic, literary, philosophical, and narrative resources, sparking cross-media conversations about the vistas revealed when one stands at the margin.