Not many studios would describe their methodology as publishing at the speed of trust. ACV do, and they mean it.
Since 2020, the London-based slow-journalism practice and creative studio has been doing things at its own pace, working across print publishing, relational design and community projects to build what it calls an ecosystem of worldmakers. Each issue takes 18 to 24 months to make. That is not a flaw in the process. It is the point.
Now, the studio has released its third publication: ACV3, themed INBETWEEN.
The 210-page litho-printed publication is centred on the question of what it means to live right now, in a moment shaped by both acute flux and deep stagnation. Rather than resolving that tension, ACV sit inside it. INBETWEEN is not a period to push through, as founder and editor Connor Rankin puts it, but “a time full of potential, where memory can meet imagination.”
The issue brings together a wide cast of contributors: Real Review founder Jack Self, community organisers Manchester Urban Diggers and London Freedom Seed Bank, environmental justice researcher and author Joycelyn Longdon, underground queer-party planners and publishing house SMUT Press, and cultural curators Nate Agbetu and Diasporas Now, among many others. Seed-keepers, storytellers, schemers and organisers; DIY collectives and edge walkers. All of them, in their own way, working at the edges of how the world might be made differently.
Central to how ACV operates is what the studio calls relational design: a methodology that starts not with a blank canvas but with relationships, context and what already exists. In practice, this means responding rather than originating, repurposing and remixing rather than starting from scratch. Art Director and Designer Anya Landolt describes it as publishing “at the speed of trust,” with each story developed collaboratively alongside contributors, resulting in a visual language that shifts across every feature.
Print, for ACV, is not a nostalgic choice, It is a considered one. The physicality of the object sits in direct counterpoint to the communities it documents, many of which are temporary, fluid and at risk. A printed page can be held, shared, passed between people, carried into different contexts. It does not disappear when the algorithm shifts. As Rachel Taylor, Editorial and Strategy at ACV, puts it: the stories are “carried across time rather than tethered to the moment.”
ACV3 will officially launch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on 7th May, in the upper gallery. The full programme is yet to be announced.
For press enquiries or to request a review copy, contact Connor Rankin at info@acvmag.com. More at acvmag.com and @acvmagazine on Instagram.
