Critical Distance hosts the joint Toronto launch of the VLC’s latest anthology As for Protocols (Vera List Center/Amherst College Press 2025) and Montréal-based writer and editor Michael Nardone’s Convivialities: Dialogues on Poetics (Talonbooks 2025). Nardone is joined by the VLC’s Re’al Christian, co-editor of As for Protocols, for a conversation on the editorial/curatorial practices and perspectives at the core of the two volumes. Both books emerge from sustained engagements with writers and artists; together, Christian and Nardone will consider how the array of artists and writers involved in their editions articulate the contemporary conditions, relational affinities, and protocols of making.

About As for Protocols
As for Protocols brings together contributions by twenty-four international artists, writers, scholars, musicians, architects, and scientists who explore protocols across various fields. Through essays, artworks, interviews, and scores, the book speaks to protocols as practice—neither conventional mannerisms nor abstract concepts, but material processes, relational affinities, shared responsibilities, and mutual care. Co-edited with an introduction by Re’al Christian, Carin Kuoni, and Eriola Pira, with an opening score by Raven Chacon and contributions by Salome Asega, Carolina Caycedo with Lupita Limón Corrales, Jesse Chun, Asia Dorsey, Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride, Pablo Helguera, Emmanuel Iduma, Mary Maggic, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee, Rashaun Mitchell with Silas Riener, Romy Opperman, Rasheedah Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Maria Hupfield, Ultra-red with Robert Sember, and Underground Resistance.

About Convivialities
Edited by Michael Nardone, Convivialities is a collection of dialogues with contemporary writers and artists Dana Michel, Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes, Shanzhai Lyric, Cecily Nicholson, Raven Chacon, Divya Victor, Carlos Soto Román, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Gail Scott, Kevin Davies, The Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group, and Ryan C. Clarke. The dialogues vary. Some are chatty, others theoretical. They model how we might talk, think, and listen together. Convivialities investigates how writers and artists craft their works, the contexts in which they make them, the intellectual and artistic histories that inspire their ways of working, and the cultural issues at the core of their practices. And, perhaps most of all, it asks how they continue to create in a world ravaged by climate crisis, economic crisis, settler colonialism, and imperialism.

About Critical Distance Centre for Curators
Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) is a not-for-profit project space, publisher, and professional network devoted to the support and advancement of curatorial inquiry and practices in Toronto, Canada, and beyond. With a focus on critically-engaged, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary curatorial practices, experimental and underrepresented perspectives and approaches, and wider public outreach and education on curating and exhibition-making, Critical Distance is an open platform for diverse curatorial perspectives, and a forum for ideas on curating as a way to foster meaningful connections across cultures, disciplines, geographies, and generations.