‘You Are of Vital Importance to the Art Community’ is a prose piece included in the ‘Inverted Comma’s’ edition of F.R.DAVID: the journal of reading and writing in contemporary art practice.

This prose piece maps a year in the life of an artist/musician who moved to Glasgow in 2006 and was deported in 2007. Observations on how practice is nested within community, and community is nested within practice, form a narrative in which the artist/musician’s life and work evolved symbiotically.

‘You Are of Vital Importance to the Art Community’ plays with the slippery second person pronoun ‘you’ to simultaneously address the reader, a community and an individual. This work of fiction fragments and challenges ideas of character coherence through a shifting subjectivity. The character of an artist/musician is fused with the character of a community and a city in a narrative which oscillates between the personal and the public.

‘Inverted Commas’s’ starting point is The Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database of pseudonyms which accounts for who is who and why who is who. This issue of F.R.DAVID focuses on the term ‘pseudonym’ through aspects of names and naming, bodies, brains, the self, audiences, authorship, and all their mutual relations.

F.R.DAVID was co-published in 2017 by uh books (Glasgow) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) with the support of Kunsthuis SYB (Netherlands).