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The colourful world of Kiblind is made up of many things. It is a quarterly magazine dedicated to contemporary illustration and also a visual communication agency based across Lyon and Paris. In 2017 it also established a Kiblind gallery, workshop and studio space dedicated to print-making and publishing projects, including its own title.

With this multidisciplinary aspect in mind it is no surprise that Kiblind’s latest print venture, the Square² boxed set, actually originates from its 101k followers-strong digital presence on Instagram. Since March 2021, Kiblind has been challenging an illustrator each month to make work for the platform’s square-shaped format and publishing the results at @kiblind_magazine.

‘In an era where the square format imposed by Instagram has redesigned many habits and artistic practices, Square² invites illustrators to reappropriate this constraint and have fun with it,’ says Kiblind. To take part in the Instagram challenge, each illustrator must make a comic strip that adheres to the following rules: create four square images in sequence; there must be a square in the centre of the first image; and the work must be produced in four colours.

‘Because it seemed unthinkable that these strips would remain confined to their Instagram post statuses, whose value is governed by an algorithm, [we] decided to make Square² a “transmedia” project that takes shape in real life,’ says Kiblind.

The Square² boxed set brings together all the strips created by the sixteen artists who took part in the challenge during its first season. Work by artists such as María Medem, Simon Bailly, María Jesús Contreras and Jean Jullien is reproduced as a series of four-page leporello (concertina-folded) strips, each housed within its own wrap-around cover.

The collection is published in an edition of 200 and is currently available from the Kiblind store.