Dismantling the Disciplined Catalogue

Through the simple gestures of putting books on shelves, tagging keywords in social media posts and putting information into a chronology inside a text, orders and hierarchies are created. The histories of coloniality, ableist dominance and patriarchal universalism are inherited and prevail in catalogs of libraries, while new technologies and categorizing algorithms disguise capitalist interests. When establishing infrastructures for assembled knowledges, how can we unfix categorization, undiscipline our shelves and yet allow access to the un-categorizable?

Derouting Distribution

Unequal access and hierarchies of information production coincide with exclusionary patterns of distribution. The boundaries rarely crossed are geographical and class-based. Especially in transnational print activism, decisions about the medium for whom, how, and by whom verbal information is perceived, circulated and given meaning are critical. How can we de- and re-route channels of distribution facing the materiality of print culture?

Cripping the Canon

Which pathways to publishing are opened up when centering human vulnerability? Access is denied to many disabled and sick authors and readers by practices of dominant ableism, which systematically normalize ability and separateness. Cripping the Canon could be understood as an imperative for a practice in which inseperability is celebrated from a focus on anti-ableism. This emphasis critically interrogates global and local forms of interdependence, dismantling ableist logics inherent in colonial modes of oppression. 

Publishing Practices #1

Study days

Dismantling the Disciplined Catalog, Derouting Distribution, and Cripping the Canon

 

Subversive forms of publishing are incited by a communal will and commitment to epistemic disobedience, through practices of delinking knowledge from Western rationality and dominant worldviews. Online and offline publications play a vital role as companions to struggles, as means of resistance, and as bridges across borders and generations. Radical publishing cultures involve themselves in establishing those bridges, or retracing severed pathways. The Study days are conceived as bridge-building between three correlated facets, Dismantling the Disciplined Catalog, Derouting Distribution, and Cripping the Canon. 

Program

Saturday, 26.02.2022 (CET)

4 pm Welcome and introduction
Dismantling the Disciplined Catalog
4.15 pm 5.15 pm Eva Weinmayr
5.30 pm 6.30 pm Shivangi Mariam Raj
Radical Distribution (Part 1)
7 pm 8 pm Pauł Sochacki
 

Sunday, 27.02.2022 (CET)  

Radical Distribution (Part 2)
4.15 pm – 5.15 pm Yin Yin Wong
Cripping the Canon
5.30 pm  6.30 pm Jorinde Splettstößer and Linnéa Meiners
7 pm – 8 pm Eva Egermann
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These Study days are a part of Publishing Practices, a yearly program committed to an expanded idea of publishing, which intends to open a collective publishing space for action, reflection, study, intervention and multisensorial encounter. Publishing Practices #1 – This Bridge Can Get Us There (2021-2022) is curated by Chiara Figone, Paz Guevara and Beya Othmani. These study days are conceived by Amelie Jakubek.
Please find information on Publishing Practices here.
 
Publishing Practices is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF).

Bios of the Contributors

In her research-based and collaborative practice, Eva Egermann engages with activist strategies, various subcultures and a range of artistic approaches. Her works and interventions deconstruct binary constellations such as health/illness, ability/inability, vulnerability/strength and persistently aim at the artistic renegotiation of reality. She lives and works in Vienna.

Linnéa Meiners (she/her) is a Berlin based curator and film director. She focusses on the aesthetics of resistance in art. Her work deals with the relationships between politics, arts and solidarity. She works at Galerie im Turm as a curator and at Kunstraum Kreuzberg as curatorial researcher. Her current film project investigates disability, chronic illness and neurodiversity.

Shivangi Mariam Raj is a translator and independent researcher from Delhi, India. Her essays, reportage, and poetry have appeared across newspapers, zines, magazines, and pamphlets published in India, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, and Nepal. Her current research draws upon sociolinguistics and ethnography to trace brahminical violence embedded in the Hindi language and its normalization in majoritarian routines and rituals in India. She is serving as the Head of Communications at The Funambulist.

Pauł Sochacki is a painter and co-founder of the street magazine Arts of the Working Class. He works in Berlin, Hamburg and Ustrzyki Dolne. 

Jorinde Splettstößer (she) is co-curator of the twoyear long exhibition and event series My Working Will Be The Work. On self/care, labour and solidarity at Galerie im Turm. She works in cultural education, exhibitions and recently certified as a translator in plain language.

Eva Weinmayr is an artist, educator, researcher and writer based in London and Gothenburg. She investigates in her work the border crossings between contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis by experimenting with modes of queer knowledge formation. In 2009 she co-founded AND Publishing, a feminist publishing platform and collaborative practice based in London and Gothenburg. AND explores the politics and infrastructures of publishing and dissemination by asking Why publish, how and for whom?

Yin Yin Wong is a designer, artist, educator and publisher based in Rotterdam. Her practice revolves around dissemination, circulation, agency, and access to art through publishing, public intervention, and graphic design.

Ongoing Projects in Berlin

Publishing Practices

From 2021 onward, Archive, in dialogue with other publishers, will set up a learning site for radical publishing. Based on the premise that the written word in its “published” form continues to exist within hegemonic systems of knowledge, we believe that publishing needs to be critically scrutinized with regard to its function to render visible, mediate, amplify, and disseminate — addressing such critique through the prism feminist and decolonial theories and practices. Archive is conducting a series of preparatory sessions in 2020 which bring together practitioners from different regions. These groups will contribute to a transdisciplinary and transnational exchange, posing the question of how and for which purpose national and disciplinary modes of interaction can be overcome through publishing. The acts of translation necessary for these debates will be integral subject matter of Publishing Practices.

Part of a series of preparatory sessions for the ongoing initiative Publishing Practices. Organized in concert with Atelier Picha, Lubumbashi.

A sessions in Accra in connection with CritLab organized by Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana. (tbc)

Part of the series of preparatory gatherings for Publishing Practices, this session connect with the project In search of archives and it’s organized in concert with Les Archives Bouanani, Rabat.

Last gathering for Publishing Practices in 2020, this session activates the feminist library run by Radio AWU and Archive in Dakar.