5 Reflection, theorization of projects

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Contents

Intro

This chapter seeks to unpick the questions underlying the various collaborative practices and experiments that I have been involved in, and that have been chosen to constitute the research contribution of the doctoral project. The purpose of this unpicking through a process of theoretical reflection is to establish how these experiments contribute to, and intervene within, the domain of intersectional feminist knowledge practices as previously mapped in the chapter "03*Survey of the field".⟶  see chapter: Survey of the Field The artistic projects described so far in the chapter "04*Summary of projects and submitted material"⟶  see chapter: Summary of projects and submitted material have each explored a range of specific questions or critical inquiries and have done so in a way that is both layered and complex. They are not discrete single-issue, single-question experiments but rather complex tangles of issues unfolding in real-world situations and "live" fields of operation. As a general introductory remark, it will help to foreground here that such artistic practices are always multi-layered and driven by a multiplicity of questions and desires. They are seldom reducible to a single monolithic thematic or question. It would, therefore, be misleading to attempt to reduce such complex experiments to one singular root question that is then theoretically unpacked. Instead, what is at stake here is a broad spectrum of issues that need to be explored in their entanglement with each other.

Nonetheless, having identified this multiplicity and real-world complexity of inquiry through practice, it is possible to indicate a recurrent concern throughout this work which is the seemingly coercive reciprocity between authorship, authorization, and authority. The question of what is validated, who is acknowledged as an author, by whom, and for what reason can be described as a consistent theme surfacing again and again across my artistic practice. It is the core set of moves that get played out in the various set projects, and I will show how each of the projects raises these questions in different ways.

⟶  see book chapter: Library Underground - a reading list for a coming community The reflection on the Library of Inclusions and Omissions looks at the potentials and limitations of libraries (in both online and physical formats) for accessing, activating, and disseminating knowledge. After all, libraries are spaces that turn marketable goods into public goods. They provide free access to knowledge that would otherwise have to be purchased. However, as I discuss in the text "Library Underground - a reading list for a coming community," a library also constitutes a disciplinary institution determining what is validated as relevant knowledge. This tension between materials that are validated as relevant knowledge and those that are left out, forms the underlying question of the project Library of Inclusions and Omissions. As a practice-led inquiry into library infrastructures, including their policies of access, validation, and classification, the project is an attempt to find out in which way such a community-run resource is fundamentally different from institutional libraries with their instituted selection and validation protocols. The project intends to test dissemination, reading and cataloging practices that tackle the biases of institutional library infrastructures. It seeks to develop curatorial concepts to give voice to hidden, suppressed, or not acknowledged materials. It asks in which way could such a curatorial strategy help to share un-acknowledged struggles, and subsequently turn a library from being a repository of knowledge (Samek 2003, Springer 2015) into a space of social and intellectual encounter and action? Can such a library project help building a community or connecting different communities?


Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? proposes a shift in the definition of publication from being an "output" to acting as "input." Consequently, this new definition asks us to redefine the dominant understanding of "impact" that is often merely based upon a logic of calculation governing our current systems of evaluation. The project, therefore, proposes to reassess the instituted taxonomy of values within learning and teaching and research at the art academy. It asks what would happen if we valued and gave formal merit to the processes and ways of how we publish, how we share and exchange knowledge rather than solely evaluating the outcome. The project inquires how open, enabling, and diverse are our knowledge practices, how inclusive are our tools and protocols by practically examining the moments, formats, and temporalities when knowledge is "practiced" at the art academy through learning and teaching and sharing research. This experiment scrutinizes how institutional habits – such as the formats of how we meet, the terminologies we use, the procurement procedures we are asked to follow, and the forms of "outcomes" that are expected – enable or hinder collective and inclusive critical knowledge practices. This chapter reflects upon the ways in which the joint planning, organizing, and hosting of the three-day event Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? alongside the distinct dissemination of the published workbook can propose an alternative.


By revisiting the five-year collaborative work with The Piracy Project, I examine in which ways the pirated, modified, emulated books in the collection transgress the normative concept of authorship and ownership. The project deals with the complexities of authorization on many different levels. It challenges the idea of individual authorship and the assumed authority of the printed book. It explores the spectrum of copying by creating a platform for re-editing, translating, paraphrasing, imitating, re-organizing, manipulating already existing works. In the theorization of this project, I will show in which way the project's unauthorized interventions into "stable" and authoritative knowledge aims to reveal and undo the reciprocity between authorship, originality and intellectual property, a triangulation that, as I will demonstrate, constitutes one of the main blockages for collective knowledge practices.


The reflection on Boxing and Unboxing leads me, once again, to questions of categorization, this time in the appearance of "boxes," that are about getting "unboxed" or "cut up" as Rhani Lee Remedes suggests in the "Manifesto for cutting up boxes." A choice had to be made which of the numerous boxes that are trapping us in our contemporary condition are to be cut up in this specific inquiry. The experiment Boxing and Unboxing is about transgressing the very boundaries we seek to protect, including the border lines we draw as "proper" individuals (an "individual" conceived as founded in the sole ownership of oneself). The section will connect Roberto Esposito's thoughts about immunity and community to the exhilarating, troubling, and demanding experiences that the sparring during the boxing sessions produced. I will reflect in which way sparring as a radical bodily dialogue could be a method to learn to compete without needing to win and to disagree with respect.


Library of Inclusions and Omissions – radical publishing practices require radical librarianship

⟶  see project: Library of Inclusions and Omissions I have mapped a range of artists' and activists' run library projects in the chapter "Survey of the field", where I reviewed the range of artistic and scholarly attention that has been brought to questions of organization and curation of physical, online, shadow, or pirate libraries. In the following, I will reflect on the practice-based experiment Library of Inclusions and Omissions by focusing on two strands. First, I examine the ramifications of institutional acquisition policies and evaluate whether the Library of Inclusions and Omissions could be a proposal for a counter-strategy. ⟶  see chapter: Survey of the fieldSecond, I study the history of Western library classification to shed light on classification's implicit dilemma presented by the need to sort and classify and by the insight that each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences others.

Which narratives enter?

For both public as well as research libraries, it has been traditionally the librarians' task, informed by library newsletters and other professional library sources to determine which topics and fields are considered relevant. This noteworthy position of institutional power to decide which books are to go on the library shelves had been highlighted and contested by several movements inside and outside academia which I discuss in more detail in the book chapter "Library Underground - a reading list for a coming community" (Sternberg 2016)⟶  see book chapter: Library Underground - a reading list for a coming community and in the conference presentation "Radical Publishing Requires Radical Librarianship.⟶  see Twitter presentation: Radical Publishing Requires Radical Librarianship As already discussed in chapter 03*Survey of the field, the Radical Librarian movement fought in the 70s in the US to reform public libraries. Critical librarians campaigned for the provision of materials that served not only the white Western middle-class readership but paid attention to the information needs of all members of the community, including its minorities. Via alternative library newsletters, acquisition librarians had been informed about the existence of marginalized knowledge and have been educated to acknowledge the limitations of their own positionality.

In the last decade, this personal accountability that could be critiqued and adjusted by critique seems to have been reduced, or even replaced by institutional policies of standardization and streamlining in the name of efficiency. For example, due to the merger of art academies into large universities, we observe the outsourcing of library services to large distributors selling ready-bundled subscription packages to institutional libraries. The University of the Arts London subscription packages consists, for instance, to large parts of exhibition catalogs of major international mainstream museums, such as MoMA New York and Tate London. These subscription packages tend to absorb most of the acquisition budget, leaving only limited funds for bespoke and contextual teaching or research material. [→ public interview with CSM Fine Art librarian conducted in 2015 at Chelsea College of Arts, London] In the same strain, the formerly decentralized cataloging units at the University of the Arts in London have been moved from the respective campus libraries to a centralized data hub that, by policy, excludes any format not conforming with commercial publishing formats. Even when produced in-house, self-published material by students or materials resulting from teaching projects cannot enter the library as a valuable and highly contextual reference within the art college. This kind of exclusion is not necessarily generated by political censorship or ignorance. Rather it stems from an institutional drive for centralizing the procedures and infrastructures in the name of efficiency. Once tasks and responsibilities are outsourced, they are much harder to be adjusted because they don't allow for a conversation or for personal accountability.

These institutional developments constitute the starting point for the Library of Inclusions and Omissions to practically rethink and test what a library actually could offer when it comes to the generation, transmission, and perception of knowledges and experiences. Please note that we are talking about a physical reading room that hosts the LIO, and the offer of physical space to linger, study, dream, and get carried away is an important aspect. The subversive nature of a library today, according to the London based artist collective OOMK, goes much further than simply housing a collection of subversive books. The library's most subversive characteristic, they claim, is the fact that it provides a free physical space to meet in, a space that yields no profit. [1]

⟶  see chapter: Survey of the field It is important to note that LIO is only one among a vast range of small scale reading rooms, library and archive projects currently being set up by artists and activists, some of which I discussed in the chapter 03*Survey of the field.

LIO builds its curatorial strategy on the community library and infoshop movement that arose in the 70s and 80s in the UK. These community archives formed part of a social movement such as radical education, second-wave feminist, or anarchist. Without affiliation to an institution, these collectively run archives and libraries were catering explicitly for the information, social, and cultural needs of their users[2]. It is interesting to observe that recently a similar community library movement is arising across the Anglo-American hemisphere, where neoliberal politics alongside austerity measures resulted in library closures across the countries.[3] Here, communities started to self-organize and experiment with the purpose and potential of self-governed archive and library spaces. Quite closely related to this movement, LIO's curatorial strategy is open and focused at the same time. Open to anyone interested in contributing; focused, because it is theme-based — asking for forgotten histories, intersectional practices, and for feminist and de-colonial knowledges. Contributions to this resource were invited via a letter in three languages (Arabic, Swedish, English).⟶  see project LIO: Invitation letter It seemed important to reach a range of diverse contributors in terms of age, gender, ethnic background and class sharing a similar concern.[4] Therefore, the letter had been widely circulated online, alongside flyers and printed posters, put up in public spaces, schools, universities, museums, independent cultural spaces, and community centers across Gothenburg and its suburbs.

In contrast to the founding assumptions of many institutional libraries, LIO does not claim to provide "neutral" or institutionally authorized knowledge. On the contrary, LIO asks for materials that are left out in institutional settings and therefore explores the limitations of the criteria of institutional validation. What is legitimized to go into a library?

One criterion of exclusion relates to formal material properties, such as standard book formats, professional print and binding to withstand the demands of being handled by many readers. More experimental or non-mainstream publications tend to go straight to the special collections department to be handled with more care. A second aspect relates to authorization. Only publications that succeeded in passing through a long chain of discrete validation steps, such as the funding body, the publisher, the distributor, the marketing, commercial distribution channels such as the bookstore, can enter the library. How can we know what is left out? We miss more ephemeral manifestations of knowledge that are not "recognized as legitimate, preconstituted, disciplinary forms of knowledge," such as zines, tweets, emails?[5]And we miss kinds of knowledge, experiences, desires, hopes and struggles that are not articulated in the form of discrete printed objects.

LIO-Eva Weinmayr-Utopia of Access-Venice Biennale03.jpg
LIO index card Nicole.jpg

LIO asks contributors for a brief statement of rationale, as to why the book they bring to the library is important to them, and why they want to share it with others. These short statements function as an index catalog for the collection.

LIO index card Jason.jpg

They are printed on yellow cards that accompany each book on the shelve and serve as an entry point and framing device for the library users.

LIO index card Sylke.jpg

Through this approach, the emphasis shifts from trying to frame the actual content of the book in an arguably objective manner, traditionally expected from the bibliographer/librarian, towards describing the readers' experiences: "what the book did for them."

LIO index card Ram.jpg

These descriptions are quite stunning accounts of discoveries, struggles, and hopes, based on the reader's experiences. Reading these accounts as an entry point into the book provides a touching insight into the book's impact on the readers, their discoveries, struggles, and hopes. Here, the catalog is not merely a technical act of organization. It is an act of telling. As in "telling, there is a desire — a desire to speak, a desire to share, to articulate an experience to an/other."[6]. The addressees of this telling are other library users, and the books with their cards can be seen as a tool to connect and find support or allies, in mind or action.

LIO index card Sarah.jpg

What the project revealed is that cataloging and verbal representations go hand in hand with a specific position of power. This is particularly the case for first level cataloging, as Ann Butler, Head of Libraries and Archives at the Centre for Curatorial Studies Bard (CCS Bard) pointed out in an interview. Only a few authorized institutions are allowed to write up the first catalog entry for a newly published book in the World Cat, for example. Subsequently, these entries are merely reproduced by other librarians when the book enters their collections and catalog. [→ see appendix: interview with Ann Butler, Head of Libraries and Archives at CCC Centre for Curatorial Studies Bard (CCS Bard), Anondale on Hudson, 2017]

The LIO's experiments with indexing and cataloging is an attempt to understand and confront the complex dilemmas of classification whose genealogy and contradictions I will trace in the following.

Perspectives and framing under the disguise of neutrality

I feel captured, solidified, and pinned to a butterfly board. Like any common living thing, I fear and reprove classification and the death it entails, and I will not allow its clutches to lock me down, although I realize I can never lure myself into simply escaping it. (Trinh T. Minh-Ha)[7]

Library scholar and librarian Emily Drabinski reports from a session with her students: During a recent information literacy session for a group of first-year students enrolled in an African-American women's history course at Sarah Lawrence College, I discussed the changing Library of Congress (LC) subject headings for this field: NEGRO WOMEN; BLACK WOMEN; AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN; etc. A student raised her hand and asked whether students specifically interested in the history of White women needed to search the catalog using the term WHITE. My colleague, a reference and instruction librarian with five years of experience, answered yes. While we might wish that LC acknowledged White as a racial category and marker for domination, it does not. LC is rooted in historical structures of White supremacy; as such, the catalog presumes White to be the normative term. The librarian got it wrong. We must get it right.[8]

Drabinski articulates here the need to acknowledge the implicit power structures and hidden biases of classification. Many library users take the established classifications and categories for granted, observes Hope Olson, "as though it were a natural landscape rather than a well-manicured lawn that is the product of intellectual labor."[9]

Although there might be a danger that acknowledging White as a category might potentially operate as a means for elaborating new forms of white supremacy that positions whiteness as a category of vulnerability, the fact that such contestations are revealed could help to understand more widely that representation (and organization) of knowledge is not as neutral as it appears. "We cannot do a classification scheme objectively, claims Drabinski, it is the nature of subject analysis to be subjective. [...] Classification schemes are socially produced and embedded structures. They are products of human labor that carry traces of all the intentional and unintentional racism, sexism, and classism of the workers who create them."[10] While claiming a neutral and universal approach, library classifications "use the hegemonic language of the powerful. They reflect, produce, and reproduce hierarchies."[11]


Universal language and "controlled vocabulary"

A large body of research has documented biases of gender, sexuality, age, class, ethnicity, language, and religion in the construction of a universal language in the naming of information for retrieval. This universal language uses a controlled vocabulary to represent documents. It limits diversity and has a direct practical impact on the reader searching for materials outside of a traditional mainstream, materials crossing disciplines, or marginalized topics.

This controlled vocabulary appears unbiased and universally applicable - but it hides its exclusions under the guise of neutrality. Olson traces the presumption of universality back to Charles Cutter's "Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalog" (1876) the reference for the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and to Melvil Dewey's introduction of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC - also published in 1876).

Charles Cutter’s misguided democratic ideal

Cutter's rationale to create a controlled vocabulary sounds like a democratic approach to serve the public, which uses the library. A uniform language, he suggests, is easy to use for the cataloguer as well as for the user. Exceptions and inconsistencies in the uniformity are allowed and even asked for if it serves "the public's habitual way of looking at things."[12]

The problem, as Hope Olson points out, is the article "the" in "the public." It envisions one community of library users that has a unified perspective. This understanding of a singular public, which defines the language this vocabulary inevitably excludes those who do not seem to fit into this community. A community in singular shares cultural, social, or political interests and excludes those, which are different. In Cutter's time, it was the patriarchal, White Western (and of Christian) worldview that dictated (and to an extent still dictates) the vocabulary of a universal language for representation of information in the library in the US.

Dewey’s obsession: standardization and efficiency

Melvil Dewey advocated a universal vocabulary in the introductions to his classification as the need to avoid confusion for efficient communication. As Olson points out, in the introduction to the first edition of DDC (1876), Dewey uses the word "confusion" twice, but the introduction to DDC13 (1932) he uses "confuzion" twenty-one times. Dewey sees a diversity of language introduced by "different librarians" at "different times" with "different viewpoints" "cauzing confuzion."[13] That leads him to call for a universal standard in the name of efficiency, time-saving, and capital.

Clasification is a necesity if all material on any givn subject is to be redily found. The labor of making one's own clasification is uzualy prohibitiv, if wel dun. By adopting the skeme in jeneral use by libraries this labor is saved and numbers ar in harmony with those of thousands of other catalogs and indexes in which the same number has the same meaning; for, as pointed out at a recent international congress, these numbers ar the only international languaj of perfectly definit meaning amung all civilized nations; and also cheapest and quickest in application.[14] (emphasis added)

Besides Dewey's obsession with standardization and efficiency, his urge for universalism seems tightly connected to an understanding of universalism grounded in white supremacy when he repeatedly refers to "civilized nations" implicitly distinguishing civilized from "uncivilized" nations. It is also interesting to note that Dewey greatly benefitted from his proposals to organize and streamline knowledge since he also ran a very successful library supplies business. His stress on efficiency made him in 1886 start-up "The Library Bureau," a company providing standardized library equipment. Its catalog seems all-encompassing, from standardized printed index cards, book order slips, gummed labels, paper shears, penholders, stamps, label holders, small mimeographs, to a range of library furniture including, filing cabinets, bookshelves, book stands, reading room tables, and chairs. All items illustrated and listed with prices for mail order. The copy of the catalog (edition 1890) that I found on the Internet Archive is digitized by Google at Harvard University. [15]

Library as disciplinary institution

It seems important to acknowledge the genealogy and biases of classification systems because the Dewey Decimal System (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) are today the most widely used classifications systems in research and public libraries worldwide. LCC is the de facto standard in research libraries in the United States. DDC is the most widely spread outside and is also used increasingly to organize Web indexing collections of Universal Resource Libraries (URL).[16]

Dewey scheme, Institut International de Bibliographie, 1914

Both classifications systems, DDC and LCC, are arranged not by subject, but by disciplines. Hope Olson discusses how the main facet of these classification schemes is based on disciplines, such as Philosophy, Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Natural Sciences, Technology, The Arts, Literature & Rhetoric, Geography & History.[17] She lays out its genealogy as deeply rooted in Western, Medieval and Renaissance philosophy reaching back from Aristoteles' to Francis Bacon's classification of knowledge to Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel via William T. Harris, (who developed the St. Louis public school library system) to Dewey, who borrowed from Harris when he developed his classification scheme while working as a library assistant at Amherst College in 1876. How, I ask, comes then that Dewey is the most used classification system in libraries worldwide – bearing in mind that is so heavily contextualized in Western philosophy? Alternatives had been developed, for instance, by Indian mathematician and librarian S.R. Ranganathan and his Five Laws of Library Science.[18] Ranganathan developed an unorthodox classification system using “facets” where several topics can be linked in a series of keywords in order to describe the various subjects present in a single book. He, therefore, ditches the strict hierarchical structure of the Dewey Decimal system that I explain in the following.

Classification — a hierarchical architecture to house the universe of knowledge

Melvil Dewey imagined a cabinet of nine pigeonholes on an office desk: Each case represents one of the nine classes and allows for nine subdivisions (pigeonholes) as a way to efficiently organize. He favors mass production over custom made solutions:

The skeme givs us for each topic, as it wer, a case of 9 pijeonholes, with a larj space at the top; and we uze them as every practical business man uzes such pijeonholes about his desk. [...] If he (the businessman) insisted on having a different case made to order for each use, it wud cost over twice as much; he cud not group them together or interchanje them, and they wud not fit offis shelvs.[19]

We can also imagine Dewey classes as separate rooms in a house. Each new entry into the library has to go into one room (hierarchy). The house has no interconnecting doors. The document can't live in two places or use the corridor to travel back and forth (relationships). Once put in one room, it mostly stays in this room (permanence, inflexibility). But into one only and that's the problem: A decision has to be made, what this document or book is about. Or what is it "most" about. Someone needs to decide what is the most crucial aspect of the book (first facet), what is the second important (subdivision) etc. This creates a hierarchy.

Philosopher Elizabeth Spelman describes such hierarchy as a powerful performative device: "Imagine a huge customs hall with numerous doors, marked 'women,' 'men,' 'Afro-American,' 'Asian-American,' 'Euro-American,' 'Hispanic- American,' 'working class,' 'middle class,' 'upper class,' 'lesbian,' 'gay,' 'heterosexual,' and so forth... The doors are arranged in banks, so that each person faces the first bank of doors that sorts according to gender, then a bank that sorts according to race, or alternatively sorts first according to race, then according to class, then according to gender, and so on".[20] Different criteria of sorting create different results: "We get different pictures of people's identities, of the extent to which one person shares some aspect of identity with another, depending on what the doors are, how they are ordered, and people are supposed to proceed through them."[21]

Sameness and Difference

What all efforts of classification have in common is that classification gathers things according to their commonalities. Olson (2001) discusses the effectiveness of the duality of sameness and difference in Western culture. She describes how we implement it from early childhood since it is a principle that helps to organize things. It can be temporal (in the same, or chronological period), spatial (relating to the same region), or used (most frequently used), or organized by similar material qualities (size, color, format, i.e., journal, book, etc.). On my bookshelf, I organize books by size, as this saves shelf space. ⟶  see section: LIO's attempt to connect different communities In the charity shop, I visit from time to time clothes are organized by color. The green rack, for example, displays a variety of garments: trousers, jumpers, hats, skirts, and dresses — what they have in common is their green color. ⟶  see section: Boxing and Unboxing - against immunization and the figure of the proper The discussion of the reciprocity of commonalities and community (and the exclusionary mechanisms at play) will reappear in several sections in this kappa. For example, in the section "LIO's attempt to connect people and communities" and in the section "Boxing and Unboxing" below.


Non-exhaustive taxonomies and provisional system making

The LIO and its accompanying research into the politics of cataloging produced an insight in which ways the catalog itself forms a meaning making structure. Since the books and the catalog in relation to each other instigate critical thinking it is not the book (its content) alone, but the protocols and ecologies that are created around it that determine how knowledges are created and shared.

Cataloging workshop, Reading Gendered Words, at "Library Interventions" Leeds College of Art, April 2017 (with Rosalie Schweiker)

Therefore, to some extent, the LIO is a proposal for a non-exhaustive taxonomy alongside many other engaged libraries that have invested much thought and creative effort to develop local, independent, or modified schemes. Some of them are discussed in the text Library Underground - a reading list for a coming community (part II' Infinite Hospitality', p. 167). Other examples include METIS, applied by the Ethical Culture School in New York, developed together with their students. They found out that some sections were under-used such as "Languages," which was turned into "Community," "Craft" is now labeled "Making Stuff." But the most radical step was to mix the classic categories of "fiction" and "non-fiction." Based on the idea, it is not the cataloger making the decision, but the students themselves. It is the student who evaluates what is imagination and what is information and discovers the blurred lines in between. Here the catalog is turned into an educational tool, a starting point for thinking and discussion about the distinction between fact and fiction. Similarly, the artist-run space Eastside Projects (Birmingham, UK) attempt to organize their book collection for their art space. They came up with a list of verbs (instead of nouns) as categories of subject headings. Similarly to the Library of Inclusions and Omissions, this framing emphasizes the agency of the books and represents what the books are doing, rather than what they are about.

* Communicating 
* Exhibiting
* Narrating
* Provoking
* Reflecting
* Answering
* Documenting
* Illuminating
* Interpreting
* Occupying
* Questioning
And 4 special sections: * Venicing * Xerox * Jonathan Monk collection * Mithu Sen (this need some protection, very fragile books) Eastside Projects Birmingham


The examples of LIO, Eastside Projects, and Metis are experiments in “non-exhaustive taxonomies and provisional system making, [… that ] keeps the door open to the 'to come'".[22] Such provisionality, as decolonial philosopher Gayatry Spivak proposes, is, more broadly, needed for decolonial knowledge practices. "The notion, […] that the world can be divided into knowable, self-contained 'areas' has come into question as more attention has been paid to movements between areas. Demographic shifts, diasporas, labor migrations, the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and hybridization have encouraged a more subtle and sensitive reading of areas' identity and composition."[23]

Working with such non-exhaustive taxonomies emphasizes the process and the methodologies of knowledge practices. Such a malleable and fluid approach is without a doubt possible in small-scale and self-organized pilots, such as the LIO. Large institutions, however, seem to struggle with keeping adapting their system making, since, according to Karen Di Franco, “with every type of establishment comes the desire to create "standards" - a sequence of operational actions or behaviors that maintain and classify activity, generally imposed for clarity, universality and in some cases, and perhaps most importantly, to save time and money. [24] ⟶  Teaching the Radical Catalog This is why Emily Drabinski confronted with the fixity of large library catalogs proposed at least to put these contestations at the center of teaching and discourse in order to negotiate with the library user the problems of standardization and fixity's implicit shortcomings and contradictions.

LIO's attempt to connect people and communities

As described earlier one of the starting questions for this project was a curiosity about the ways such a community-based and open resource can help building, or connecting different communities.

However, my hopes that the project might act as an agent to transgress the boundaries between the institutional community at HDK-Valand Academy and diverse self-organized communities operating outside academia were only partly achieved. Reflecting on the set-up and process I can identify several reasons. First, tensions between artistic authorship/ownership and collectivity emerged. These frictions related to my role as an individual artist instigating this collaborative project in an artistic framework. The "invitation to contribute" in the form of an open call makes a structural distinction between the one who instigates and the ones who contribute. It creates a hierarchy of responsibilities, and therefore ownership and power. What I learned was that a collective project to be sustainable can't be framed as individual research or art project. Instead, in order to make this a community project the involved parties would need to develop the framework, terms and conditions together from the start.

Second, I came to understand that not only categories, but also communities are based on commonalities. (Esposito) For example, the call for contributions that circulated in my own community of practice, HDK-Valand Art Academy, triggered much interest and contributions. In this environment of shared interests and commonalities, people knew me or knew about me. It also might be the case that my links to the institution, such as being a doctoral researcher, gave me some degree of respect or authority, which people felt they could trust and rely on. A large number of contributions also arrived from people who already knew of my involvement with AND Publishing and The Piracy Project, which apparently gave me some sort of recognition or legitimization or just made people curious to be part of LIO. However, my hope that the project might make the boundaries between the institution and the wider communities outside more fluid, that it could bring different communities via books into one room was not achieved. It would have required much more time to build sustainable connections and trust to other communities, to fulfill the feminist, communitarian principles of sharing, reciprocity, and relationality and not exercise, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us, a potential exploitative act of academic research (institutionalized in the art context, academic disciplines, curricula, universities and power) of extracting and appropriating informal knowledges.[25] Why would somebody make a gift to a community they are not part of? Reflecting on the power dynamics of my invitation I ask what would drive a member of an immigrant community, for example, to contribute to an art exhibition in an academic context? Would they rather set up their own library - with their own topics and struggles according to their own terms and conditions? Apparently, as it turned out the exchange economy of such an invitation is problematic.


The Piracy Project

⟶  see project: The Piracy Project The Piracy Project (TPP), a collaboration with Peruvian artist Andrea Francke, deals with questions of authorship, authorization, and authority in a hands-on way. By prompting people to "pirate" a book that is important to them, to reproduce books by making physical copies manually, TPP challenges the perception of a printed book as a finite resource and a stable and authoritative object. Through the unauthorized interventions and alterations of the books' textual and visual content, TPP transgresses the concept of authorship as it is presented by the coercive relationship between originality, intellectual property and copyright, and therefore deals with the complexities of authorization on many different levels, as I will explain in the following.

Piracy Project Byam Shaw Andrea findings in Peru.jpg

These conceptualizations and questions were not clear-cut at the beginning of TPP. Its starting point was twofold. Firstly the announcement of the proposed closure of the library at Byam Shaw School of Art in London created a political situation that triggered the urge to imagine creative ways to confront it.[26] Secondly, Daniel Alarcon's essay about book piracy in Peru in Granta Magazine, where he mentioned that pirates had sometimes altered and amended (un-authorized and anonymously) the plot of some fiction books seemed puzzling and exciting.[27]Speechbubble.png

Rosalie-eva phd 35-lres.jpg

Annotated by RS

Even more exciting were, on Andrea's return from a visit to Lima, the pirated and altered books, that she bought from street vendors and at pirate book markets in Lima.

Students and staff joint efforts and, supported by its acting Principal, turned the art college library to-be-closed into a self-organized and self-governed resource of knowledges that remained public – and thus intellectually and socially generative. This move was not without antagonism, because right at that time, the British Prime Minister of the day, David Cameron, launched his perfidious "The Big Society" concept proposing that members of the community should volunteer at public institutions, such as local libraries, which were destined to be closed due to government cuts. Some colleagues were skeptical suggesting that rather turning the library into "a project," more time and energy should be invested into campaigning to keep the library running as an institutionally funded resource and so revoking the management's decision. This shift from an institutionally run library to one organized by students and staff was productive, after all, since it opened up many imaginaries and possibilities to experiment and rethink what a library could be. By taking collective ownership over the physical space and its books, the library opened up from being an institutional controlled and authorized resource – to an assemblage of knowledges that appeared in different forms and formats, potentially obscure, self-published or going beyond the printed book altogether.[28]

The Piracy Project's richness, energy, and complexity unfolded through a range of collaborations and debates: the close thinking and acting together with Andrea Franke, with the roughly 150 contributors who produced and submitted pirate copies and with the many institutions that hosted The Piracy Project after the Byam Shaw Library was eventually closed down in 2012.[29] ⟶  see Piracy Project: Organising discursive events By then, the project had grown extensively and attracted much attention and got consequently invited for residencies, reading rooms, workshops, lectures, panel discussions and debates by a range of national and international cultural institutions.

Queering the authority of the printed book

The Piracy Project shares concerns with practices of radical shadow libraries such as Monoskop, aaaarg.fail, Memory of the World that are setting up distribution platforms to fight enclosures by commercial monopolies, which I map in more detail in the chapter "Survey of the field." ⟶  see chapter: Survey of the field: Radical Librarianship: Shadow Libraries However, while current practices of shadow librarianship work towards the open and free circulation of books to circumvent enclosures, TPP does not primarily function as a dissemination platform to circulate pirated books. It gathers a collection of mainly one-off physical copies, that "explore the spectrum of copying, re-editing, translating, paraphrasing, imitating, re-organizing, manipulating of already existing works," as the open call and the distributed poster state. ⟶  see: Open call as Art Agenda anouncement

As such, TPP introduces a further aspect to current shadow librarianship by shifting the focus from issues of circulation and access to questions of authorship and authorization. By instigating potential contributors to make printed copies of already existing books, TPP asks to rethink, test, and reflect on the relationship between the authorized source and the modified unauthorized pirate copy.

Johann Comenius, Orbis Sensualis Pictus, "The Bookseller" (1660) shows a book shop in which sections of the book could be purchased and according to the available budget of the buyer custom made bound

These manipulations could be described as queering the authority of the printed book, an authority that existed since the 19th century when steam-powered rotary presses replaced hand-operated printing presses. Since printing on an industrial scale allowed for print-runs of many thousand copies, one just tends to assume that the copy of a book we are reading is identical to other copies of the same title circulating on the market. However, before litho-printing turned industrial the book was a less stable and authoritative object. Similarly, one can observe some moments in recent printing history that rupture such reliance on these established processes of authorization. The advent and widespread accessibility of the photocopy machine in the late 1960s in the US, for example, allowed the reader to photocopy books and collate selected chapters, pages or images in new and customized compilations.[30]

These new reproduction technologies undermine to an extent the concept of the printed book as a stable and authoritative work, which had prevailed since the mass production of books on industrial printing presses came into being. History of information scholar Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén describes how the general availability of the photocopier has been perceived as a threat to the authority of the text. She cites Marshall McLuhan's address at the Vision 65 congress in 1965:

Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher. [….] Authorship and readership alike can become production-oriented under xerography. Anyone can take a book apart, insert parts of other books and other materials of his own interest, and make his own book in a relatively fast time. Any teacher can take any ten textbooks on any subject and custom-make a different one by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one and from that one.[31]

Via the photocopier, many artists and activists got access to cheap and instant reproduction technologies that shaped a range of counter-culture movements in the 80s and 90s in North America – exactly because it was a cheap, ephemeral and immediate means of printed communication.[32] Of course, the handmade quality of feminist zines, the visibility of scissors and glue, do not pretend to have gone through the same chain of authorizations as a mass-produced printed hardcover or paperback book. The authority of the mass-produced book lays in its production value that is reflected in involving a proofreader, a designer, a publisher, a printer, as well as entering the book trade, such as commercial distribution network, and bookshops. These distinctions, interestingly, have become obsolete since digital printing presses allow for small print runs, down to one copy, in a material quality that is almost not distinguishable from mass-produced litho printed books. ⟶  see essay: The Impermanent Book discussing how the mutability and instability of the book disrupts reading habits The print-on-demand model, for example, widely introduced to the book market in the early 2000s, allowed for constant re-printing and re-editing of existing files.

AND Publishing, Variable Formats, an experimental series of sample books using 12 different commercial POD platforms. Conceived by Lynn Harris and Design Collective Åbake, London, 2012.

This new technology of versioning has been used as a conceptual tool by many cultural workers. For example, the publication "An Incomplete Reader for the Ongoing Project, 'One day, everything will be free'... is described by its editor Joseph Redwood Martinez as "approximating software rather than a book or an exhibition catalog [...] Just as with software releases – where version 0.0.1 is followed indefinitely with sporadic updates, bug-fixes, and complete revisions – the publication is, and will always be, necessarily incomplete and unfinished."[33] Here the tactic of versioning is openly articulated as a conceptual tool. The reader is informed right away, that there is no authoritative copy of the publication, that it is to be understood as a temporary stabilization within a continuous process.

Neil Chapman, Deleuze "Proust and Signs," slide from presentation at symposium "Feminist Writing", Centre for Feminist Research Goldsmiths London, 2014. Listen to podcast.

Pirated books could as well be understood as a form of versioning, particularly if the pirate copy shows some unauthorized transformations and alterations in relation to its source – with the important difference that they rather tend not to state that fact. In contrast to openly versioned books, pirated books frequently undergo modifications – whether materially (format, paper, print) or content (change of plot, fan fiction, names, chapters, illustrations, etc.) while pretending to be the authoritative copy.

For example, artist and writer Neil Chapman's handmade facsimile of Gilles Deleuze's "Proust and Signs"[34] explores the materiality of print and related questions around institutional protocols of authorization. Chapman produced a handmade facsimile of his personal paperback copy of Deleuze's work which included some binding mistakes (a few pages were bound upside down) by scanning and printing the book on his home inkjet printer. The pirate is close to the source's format, cover, and weight. However, it has a crafty feel to it: the ink soaks into the paper, creating a blurry text image that is very different from a mass-produced offset printed text. It has been assembled in DIY style and speaks the language of amateurism and makeshift. The transformation is subtle, and it is this subtlety that makes the book subversive in an institutional library context. How do students deal with their expectations to access authoritative and validated knowledge on the library shelf, instead, they encounter a book that is printed and assembled by hand?[35] Such publications circumvent the chain of institutional validation: from the author to the publisher, the book trade, and lastly the librarian purchasing and cataloging the book according to the standard bibliographic practices. A similar challenge to a perceived stability of the printed book and the related hierarchy of knowledge occurred when students at Byam Shaw sought a copy of Jacques Rancière's "Ignorant Schoolmaster" and found three varying copies that had been modified in different ways as part of the Piracy Project. One of them, as a kind of response to Rancière's pedagogical proposal, featured deleted passages that left blank spaces for the reader to fill in and to construct meaning in place of Ranciere's text.[36]

Who has the right to be an author: Copyright and IP

Performative Debate: A Day at the Courtroom, The Showroom London, June 15, 2013. With Lionel Bently (Professor of Intellectual Property at the University Cambridge), Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento (Art and Law, New York), Prodromos Tsiavos (Creative Commons, England, Wales, and Greece). Courtroom drawing by Thandiwe Stephanie Johnstone.
Performative Debate: A Day at the Courtroom, The Showroom London, June 15, 2013.

One of the main blockages for collective knowledge practices that emerged in this inquiry is the mutual reciprocity between authorship and ownership, as defined by intellectual property and copyright law. Feminist legal scholar Carys Craig argues that copyright law, and the concept of authorship it supports, fail to adequately recognize the essentially social nature of human creativity. It chooses relationships qua private property instead of recognizing the author as necessarily social situated and therefore creating within a network of social relations.[37] According to Mark Rose "Copyright is not a transcendent moral idea but a specifically modern formation [of property rights] produced by printing technology, marketplace economics and the classical liberal culture of possessive individualism".[38] Therefore in copyright law, the author is unequivocally postulated in terms of liberal and neoliberal values in combining the concept of authorship, originality, and property. I have explored the problematic reciprocity of these three concepts in the book chapter "Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices - how copyright destroys collective practice" by the example of The Piracy Project. In that chapter, I have also explored the intricacies of the ways in which the vocabulary and mindset of intellectual property, the idea that knowledge is "original" and can be owned, infiltrates collective knowledge practices, in learning and teaching environments at the university for example. The problem seems that intellectual property is tightly connected to an idea of individual originality and genius, that, as I have shown, is critiqued practically and theoretically through this inquiry.

The question of what is deemed to be "original", or to define authorial originality in a derivative work, for example, has been the purpose of many court cases.[39] And since copyright is case law, the verdicts are informed by many different factors. Consequently, this legal grey zone tends to create a climate of anxiety and, subsequently, self-censorship. You don't do stuff because you don't know whether it might be interpreted as copyright infringement. This self-limiting instinct is convincingly documented in a 2014 report commissioned by the College Art Association in the USA. [40], which has informed my argument greatly and forms the basis for the book chapter "Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices."

To put the legal framework to a test TPP organized a performative debate entitled "A Day at the Courtroom", hosted by the public-funded artspace The Showroom in London during TPP's one-year residency in 2013. For this debate, we invited three copyright lawyers from different cultural and legal backgrounds [41] to assess ten selected cases of TPP collection items in the eyes of their respective legal and cultural framework. We were curious about this debate, in which each lawyer argued their legal perspective. At the end of the lawyer's argument for each case, it was on the audience to speak the verdict and place the book on a sliding color scale from red (infringing) to blue (non-infringing) to replace the "illegal" – "legal" binary on which jurisdiction is built.

This debate interestingly illustrated that, for example, one selected case would be regarded as Fair Use exception in Europe, but not in the United States.[42] Lots of effort went into the discussion of how "originality" is defined and what the criteria are for being granted the status of an "author." In the case of "Suitcase Body is Missing Woman," one of the books assessed in this deliberation, the lawyers raised the question, whether a person untrained in the arts could claim original artistic expression for their work. Another case, which discussed a commercially motivated predatory publishing practice, such as pulling content from a knowledge commons such as Wikipedia, was unison deemed legal by the lawyers. ⟶  For an edited transcript of this debate see book chapter: A day at the Courtroom[43]

Such events organized bt TPP serve to collectively unpack the conflicted complexities within intellectual property law help to grasp the extent to which these policy debates, as well as the sheer use of the term "intellectual property," has become omnipresent pervading our thinking and working and not least our social relationships.

Unsolicited Collaborations: queering the authorial voice

Some contributions to TPP modify the content of their source, undermining the assumed authority of the authorial voice. Authorship is, no doubt, a method to develop one's voice, to communicate, and to interact with others, to be responsible and accountable. Still, it is also a legal, economic, and institutional construct, and it is this function of authorship as a framing and measuring device that is critiqued by TPP's practice.

Jaime Bayly "No se lo diga a nadie," right: pirated copy bought in Lima Peru (2011), left: source copy (1994).

See, for example, the case of the pirated version of "No se lo diga a nadie" (Don't tell anyone), a copy that Andrea Francke had found while browsing 'Amazonas,' one of Peru's biggest pirate book markets in Lima. Here the pirate secretly and anonymously added two extra chapters to a famous autobiographical novel by Peruvian journalist and TV presenter Jaime Baily. Somebody had borrowed the official author's voice and sneaked in anonymously two fictionalized extra chapters about the author's life.

"No se lo diga a nadie, "slide from presentation at symposium "Feminist Writing", Centre for Feminist Research Goldsmiths London, 2014. Listen to podcast.

None of the cases contributed to TPP asked for authorization from the author or publisher, and therefore, we sometimes coin them "unsolicited collaborations." The term collaboration refers to a relational activity. It re-imagines authorship not as proprietary and stable, but as a dialogical and generative process. Feminist legal scholar Carys Craig claims that "authorship is not originative but participative; it is not internal but interactive; it is not independent but interdependent. In short, a dialogic account of authorship is equipped to appreciate the derivative, collaborative, and communicative nature of authorial activity in a way that the romantic account (individual genius) never can."[44]

Intellectual property law is confronted with dilemmas when it comes to acknowledging a dialogical understanding of authorship since the law tends to start from a concept of originality that subsequently is turned into property. The legal policy debate is going in circles – on one side critical piratical practices, and free culture and copyleft activists are campaigning for an open culture that is not based on ownership, on the other side the media industry keeps lobbying for tougher protection against cultural piracy to secure their profits.[45]

⟶  see workshop: Interfacing the law

Interestingly Femke Snelting (Constant), expresses doubt and a certain discomfort about a potential heroism in disobedient pirate cultures that tends to prevail in activist circles.

The disobedient stance of piracy can obscure the way it keeps categories of knowledge in place, either by calling upon universalist sentiments for the right to access, by relying on conventional modes of care or by avoiding the complicated subject of the law altogether. I am writing you this to show how the current landscape of intellectual property produces paradoxical positions that we all take on a daily basis: what (not) to download, share and distribute; what to consider normal, brave, necessary, or too risky.[46]

⟶  see co-edited book: Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating, AND Publishing, 2014

The Piracy Project Reading Room, Grand Union, Birmingham. Curated by Cheryl Jones. 6 Dec 2013 – 8 Feb 2014.
Piracy Reader

Sensing out and acknowledging the paradoxical positions that the reductive legal-illegal binary produces is at the center of the Piracy Project's practice. It is about learning to make decisions on what one thinks is ok or not and to put one's own moral boundaries to a test – not in secrecy, but in the open in order to make it tangible and negotiable.

In an attempt to map the complexities of such "unsolicited collaborations" as a kind of expanded reference practices we put together a list of terms nuancing the vocabulary of relationships to somebody else's work. "Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating" – the title of a book Andrea and I edited – are verbs (active words) that show the complexities and qualities of possible relationships. Each term points to a different quality of reference and economy of exchange. [47]


The social agency of piracy

Similarly, media and communication scholar Ramon Lobato asks, whether the language of piracy used by the critical intellectual property discourse "should be embraced, rejected, recuperated or re-articulated"? He contends that reducing piracy to a mere legal category – a question of conforming or nonconforming with the law – tends to neglect the generative force of piracy practices, which 'create (their) own economies, exemplify wider changes in social structure, and bring into being tense and unusual relationships between consumers, cultural producers and governments."[48]

To understand the actual agency of piracy beyond its legal interpretations it is helpful, as Gary Hall did in his book "Pirate Philosophy, For a digital Posthumanities" to look at the genealogy of the word pirate. "When the word pirate first appeared in ancient Greek texts, it was closely related to the noun 'peira' which means trial or attempt."[49] The 'pirate' would then be the one who 'tests', 'puts to proof', 'contends with', and 'makes an attempt'. Further etymological research shows that from the same word root stems p i ra : experience, practice [πείρα], p i rama : experiment [πείραμα], p i ragma: teasing [πείραγμα] and pir a zo : tease, give trouble [πειράζω].[50]

This "teasing, making an attempt, contending with", and to some extent "to give trouble" is at the very core of TPP's practice. Firstly by inviting people to make a pirate copy and reflect on the various implications of this practice and its context (copyright regimes, knowledge enclosures, individual authorship, neo-liberal university) the project creates facts and propositions that are discussed, debated and reflected upon in order to establish new forms of relationships and forms of sharing.

And secondly, through our research into cases of already existing book piracy in China, Turkey, Peru (outside the art context), the project studies piratical methods and tactics, applied by individuals or collectives which – for different reasons – copied, pirated, modified, reproduced and circulated other authors’ work. It creates insights about the motivations and reasons for such acts that range from political activism and acts of civil disobedience (in order to circumvent enclosures such as censorship or market monopolies) to acts of piracy generated by commercial interests.

The limits of framing and exhibiting

Here, in its capacity of creating insights, interestingly, the project was confronted with a paradox. Exactly because the pirates' agency unfolds under the radar of authorities and in secrecy, it is problematic to expose these tactics in the framework of (artistic) research. Take the example of the pirated autobiography of Jayme Bayli. As soon as the fact of the anonymously added chapters is revealed the book loses its subversiveness and turns into a document that shows and tells, that can be studied and serves as an "epistemic object", a shift which I will expand upon in the chapter Analysis. I wonder whether the "exhibition" of the pirated Jaime Bayli book on the shelves in the Piracy Reading Rooms comes close to Suzanne Briet's metaphor of the caged antelope. Briet, a scholar in documentalist practices, proposes that an antelope running in the Savannah in East Africa is considered a wild animal, while a wild antelope captured, brought to Europe - to be exhibited in the zoo, caged, described, measured, and classified is being turned into a document.

Andrea and I created the Piracy Project Index Catalog because we were looking for a method to have the collection open to the public, without us needed there in person to convey the story and trajectory of the books, what piratical tactic had been used and what is the political, cultural context for the intervention. The books were always displayed with their index cards that describe the pirate book's genealogy, its material properties, what tactics have been used, the source copy and how it got into the collection. All in all, these cards function as an entry point and framing device for the book.

During The Piracy Project Reading Room at the New York Art Book Fair in 2011, a librarian from the art school Pratt Institute in New York stepped by our room every single day, because she was so fixed on the questions the books raise in respect to normative cataloging and bibliography standards. Take again Jaime Bayli's "No se diga a nadie," as an example. Who would be named as the author? How can you pay justice to the protracted "more than one authorship" in this work?[51] ⟶  see: Piracy Project Searchable Online Catalog

The job to name and describe each pirate book for the catalog went in hand with the question of how to organize the books on the shelf in the reading rooms. In line with the discussion of the fixity and contradictions of Subject Headings in libraries, discussed above in the reflection about the Library of Inclusions and Ommissions, Andrea and I experimented with varying subject categories when spatially organizing the books on the shelves. At the Showroom in London, we organized the books according to legal categories, such as "Private Use," "Public Domain," "First Sale Doctrine," "Modification/Fair Use." One year later, at Kunstverein Munich, the collection was grouped according to their modes of distribution.[52]

The White Market for books encompasses all legal and authorized distribution through traditional channels. The books in this selection have been produced through publishing houses, have ISBNs, and are produced in higher quantities that allow for commercial distribution.
The Grey Market for books includes publications produced in higher edition numbers than the one circulating through specific, non-official networks. We included fanzines and artists' books that are sold only at specialized shops in this section. 
The Black Market for books encompasses distribution through illegal and unauthorized commercial channels. The books in this section were purchased at pirate markets and copy shops.
Archive As Distribution are examples of pirated books that are produced for archival reasons. They are out of circulation and were sent to us to remain accessible. We also gather here books that are one-offs, produced specifically for the Piracy Collection in response to our open call. 
Print On Demand points to a new type of market. It produces books with a professional finish and ISBN in potentially unlimited quantities that can circulate in mainstream commercial distribution channels. A book, produced through lulu.com, for example, will be a one-off until a second copy is purchased. Only then the second copy will be printed and shipped. Distribution triggers production; it defines the market dynamically. It allows books to oscillate between grey and white market zones seamlessly.
Putting The Piracy Collection on the shelf, Grand Union, Birmingham

Based on these experiments, we invited during The Piracy Reading Room at Grand Union in Birmingham archivist Karen Di Franco as well as interested participants to produce descriptive terms (thesaurus) to categorize items in the collection that pay attention to their transitory nature. ⟶  see chapter Reflection: Perspectives and framing under the disguise of neutrality "It is easy to see how terms will deviate from a thesaurus of standards," di Franco writes about this workshop, since ::terms are needed to describe the transit, transmission and the conditions of the original as well as acknowledging the changes made to produce the pirate. These words should be a conductive medium – transmitting the modes and methods of production across space and time. [...] It is time to consider the catalog as equally peripatetic Di Franco claims and compares this process of finding descriptors for the books in the Piracy Project with collections such as those at the Warburg Institute "that have been transitory, are enlivened or enriched by their re-ordering and follow a structure that is inherent to their construct, with catalogs and indexes that echo the interests of the persons that inhabit the library space" she highlights the necessity of an alternative thesaurus specifically made from and for these collections.[53]

Why we decided to end the project

Because the PP had a strong focus on research and discourse, we got over the years, more and more hesitant to say yes to short-term invitations to exhibit the project. More than once turned the traditional exhibition framework the reading room - which for us was thought of as a trigger for collaboration and exchange – into a sheer display of exhibits.Speechbubble.png

We kept trying to find ways to make the process of exhibiting fruitful for us. We wanted something to happen through it. Just re-presenting or re-sharing the books was boring and not enough. We wanted to find ways to not keep rehashing the same conversations over and over so we decided to catalog the collection in different ways each time we displayed it.

For Munich, we categorised the books according to the modes in which they were distributed. It was clear that the categorisation did impact the questions the visitors formulated to the collection. It also made clear that it was hard for us to do this in a way that allowed us to share the collection in an additive way. We didn’t find a way to enable the collection to accumulate the knowledge that emerged at every exhibition and encounter and to allow people to access it so they could catch up with us. We were still the bodies that needed to mediate the collection and that meant we were permanently stuck in the shallow aspects of the arguments. To me, we were slowly becoming the maintainers of the collection and I wasn’t comfortable with that role.

Annotated by AF

These were at risk to be treated as curiosities, rather than serving as a kickstart for a nuanced and growing discourse with an interested community of practice in order to deepen the topics. Also, the "touring" of the PP, towards the end of the project, to different locations and contexts meant that on each new occasion a discussion had to be built from scratch. That inevitably led us to repeat ourselves and deliver the narrative over and over again. Sometimes it turned into a one-way conversation, a service. Sometimes the traditional exhibition time frame was simply too short or our situation too precarious and Andrea and I too exhausted to pull off meaningful events in each new context in quick succession.[54]

So exciting and thought-provoking the collected books in the Piracy Project are, they are at risk to be seen and treated as curiosities when taken out of circulation and exhibited on the shelf.



Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? – collectivity: Who authorizes whom?

⟶  see project: Let's Mobilize: What is feminist pedagogy? Let's Mobilize, in contrast to LIO and the PP situates itself right inside a higher education institution, HDK-Valand, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg. What "Let's Mobilize" has in common with the other projects is the drive to interrogate the dominant knowledge practices, their references, and their respective formats. It is an attempt to establish how the formats and infrastructures of production and circulation determine the agency of these knowledges and their process of making meaning. LIO is dealing with these questions concerning already published material. Let's Mobilize, in contrast, kicks in and focuses on an earlier point in the chain of knowledge practices, namely how the moment of learning and teaching, a discursive, time-based moment is determined by the norms, infrastructures, and regulations of a state-run higher education institution. This question forms the core of a follow-up research project, "Teaching to Transgress Toolbox," an Erasmus+ funded Strategic Partnership (2019-2021) with Ecole de Recherche Graphique (erg, Brussels) and ISBA (Institute des Beaux-Arts, Besancon).[55]

The reflection on the mobilization experiment is best structured in two aspects. A first angle is the mobilization's experiments with non-normative teaching and conference formats. This includes testing new roles, languages, non-normative uses of the building and its rooms, as well as experimental approaches to timing, budgeting, catering and hosting of participants, It comprises the often neglected, and I would claim neglected because "un-authored," practices of organizing and care for such an event. In a second step, I will address the experimental approach to production and dissemination of the Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy Workbook published four weeks before the event.


Non-normative approaches and institutional habits

The good-enough institution can recognize its mistakes, analyze them and correct them. It also knows how to recognize its limits and accept them, as best they can. [...] It is to be able to work below the ideal of the model. However, the good-enough management with her team good enough must be able to deploy the energy constantly to renew, to try to get as close as possible to this ideal. The institution that works well is the one where we speak, where we decide, and where we recognize its diseases. Duty acknowledged.
(Philippe Kinoo)[56]

The explicit aim of the workgroup ⟶  see: Let's Mobilize Working group that formed at the university was to shed light on the complexities of the tensions arising between being a member of the institution and testing, researching the limitations of its established habits and modes of doing things. Concretely the workgroup embarked on an experiment on how a "conference" on knowledge practices can be organized in a way that itself rethinks and tests the formats it employs and thereby directly translates the addressed theoretical concepts into action. The quotation marks around the term conference already give a hint on how the workgroup attempted to rethink the normative nomenclature and the roles, functions, and hierarchies it produces - described in the chapter "Glossary" in "Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? Workbook".

⟶  see edited book: "Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?", chapter "Glossary" I have already discussed the ways in which descriptors are performative and political in the field of cataloging and classifying in the section "Perspectives and framing under the disguise of neutrality" above. In an attempt to adjust the institutionally instated terminology, the Let's Mobilize workgroup replaced the term "conference" with "mobilization" because the workgroup aimed at a practical, dynamic, activist and generative outcome, rather than "delivering" knowledge in the form of papers, for instance. Has something been mobilized? So people, who join "a mobilization" come with different desires, energies, mindsets – wanting to work out practical ways how to translate research or knowledge into practice. Getting initial traction within the workgroup, then the administration and then the lecturers' and students' public, the new terminology eventually got adopted across the organization. [show admin docs?]

This process of shifting the nomenclature within the academy community evidences our desire to organize an event that is embedded, addresses, and rethinks the structural processes of how we work together at the academy. This desire is informed by a wide range of research into institutional analyses and infrastructure studies[57], and the way institutional codes enable or impede modes of thinking and acting among individuals within this institution. (Raunig, Rassel, Gorianova, Biesta, Kelly)

Let's Mobilize starts from the assumption that institutions aren't self-contained and fixed structures, but environments formed by an "instituting movement" of its members. This approach is based on the conviction that if we want to reform and test the pedagogies we practice, we also need to invite the management, the technicians, and the administrators into the discussion.[58] Institution has been described, on the one hand, as a potential to be developed (instituting). On the other, it also constitutes an established form (institution). It is a constant negotiating between these two forces, in which alienation is produced when the "instituted" takes precedence over the "instituting."[59] This tension between the "instituted" and the "instituting" performed an ongoing tension during the project.

"The Un-authored" Practices of Organizing and Caring or the administrators as co-author

Because the working group rethought all these processes, formats, and interactions fundamentally, it had to understand and tweak the existing procedures prescribed by the university procurement. This would not have been possible without the inventive support of the management and the administration. Think of the collective sleepover in the main assembly room, mentioned earlier. Staying overnight in the academy building is officially not permitted. Only through negotiations and with the creative support of the acting Prefect, for example, the sleepover could become part of the program as Forum 6: "When do we learn? Non-normative uses of the seminar room".[60] In the following I will give selected examples of how intricate negotiations and dealings with the Academy personnel were, whose day-to-day job was to follow, interpret and execute the rules and regulations.

"This variety of 'doing things differently' from standard university procedures, generated a lot of work, stress, and frustration for both the workgroup and for administrators. In order to deal with policies creatively and productively, one must know them well and thoroughly.[61] Current critiques of administration refer to the administration of the body and the way bureaucracy controls the flows of our everyday life: "From passport control to binary gender categories on job application forms, administration gently pushes us into ideologically assigned roles and positions and then traps us there."[58] Therefore, in queer activist and legal scholar Dean Spade's words "policy and administrative systems are the invisible disciplinary forces that generate our experiences as subjects."[62]

Interestingly, current critiques of administration often focus on the body that is administered Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine pointed out and ask "But what of the administrator?" They argue that in order "to be deemed successful in their task the administrators must adhere to a range of standards and style guides that masks their identity with that of the institution through policies of best practice and standardization, [...] actions become attached to roles instead to individuals [...] and therefore the administrator's position as a subject is being erased."[58] But exactly because administrators are the anonymous subjects, that generate and enforce those systems, they are vital for enacting political transformation, as Francke and Jardine claim.

Therefore it was crucial not to produce a "we" – "them" dichotomy, but to work as closely together as possible. This was at times difficult, because the project created extra work, and not everyone prioritized the project's cause in the daily workload of running of the institution - either for ideological reasons or because it was not possible (no hours allocated) to invest unpaid time and energy in the project and join, for example, the workgroup meetings in which ideas were developed and discussed.

Collectivity: Desires and Complications

Trust, care, and confidences were broken. Feelings of unworthiness surfaced and created fractions. Collective and collaborative practice involves negotiation and communication. A lot of focus was on creating a transparent structure with regards to the mobilization economy, a clear glossary with intentions, etc. However, we would have benefitted from a clear audit of ourselves, our ability to commit, our expectations, and our insecurities. Easier to say with hindsight.[63]

This comment from a member of the workgroup, summarises the contestations and conflicts within the group, once the mobilization date came closer and the pressure had risen.Speechbubble.png

In collective processes like the one within the feminist working group the relation/balance between care and efficiency is one that is hard to negotiate. Several times during the work process we discussed the traditional feminist strategy of doing personal ”check-ins” of how we all were doing heading into a meeting for example, to take care of each other and for everyone in the group to know where each individual ”is at” so that the group can hence relate to everyones situation when working together. The tricky situation is when the pressure to perform/ to achieve/ to get the work done/ adds in the group then its hard to commit to strategies like these time wise. Committing to strategies like these means that you really have to take care of what unfolds in these check-ins and be able to commit to the personal conversations and give the personal care that is being required between individuals in the group in the situation, even if it means that most of the meeting time will be spent on personal conversations. If the group lacks that commitment then strategies like these run the risk of only becoming symbolic gestures instead of transformative actions. So the juxtaposition between Time and Care becomes explicit when pressure rises in the project and often the act of care is neglected to the benifit of production and efficiency. To find out sustainable strategies to negotiate this juxtaposition between Care and Efficiency is for me one of the hardest tasks of working collectively and an ever trickier balance in the everyday working life of our contemporary institutions per se.

Annotated by AE

We only understood after the event that while investing so much time and effort to define roles, achieve transparency, provide care in relation to the event, we fell short of achieving this sufficiently within the group. In "Do the right thing - a manual," Johanna Gustavsson and Lisa Nyberg report how important accountability and transparency are for collective work. The list of priorities goes like this:

(1) Talk openly about money. (2) Talk openly about commitment and time. (3) Make room for economy and time planning already from the start. Ask each other how much time you can and want to invest in the joint project. This way, the collaboration can function even though one person invests 10% and the others 100%. It is important to be prepared that someone might be less involved in periods, so it's good to have those discussions early on.[64]

We learned early on from the collective reading of Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" that we need transparency on decisions we take.[65] Hence it became a guiding principle in our communication with each other to take notes in every working group meeting, which were uploaded to a shared online "blackboard" information box. Still, our collective summary says that "our care for the participants pre-empted the care for the working group," and that in the hot phase approaching the event, "we did not initiate moments of rest, time to check in with each other. This created problems personally and interpersonally."[63] It was the imbalance of priorities within the group and commitment to other projects, which caused imbalance and frustration overall. We had collectively read the experiences in the MFK manual about being transparent and outspoken on priorities and availability. Still, we did not strictly check in on this during the process. The consequence was that those regularly attending the decision-making meetings inevitably developed more responsibility and, therefore, group and project power than others, who came only sporadically. That was not the horizontal structure we imagined and led to frustrations on all sides – with some complaining about the lack of commitment and others about being silenced. Due to immense pressure to deliver, this imbalance was not appropriately addressed, as we just wanted to get on. Another structural problem was that I could afford to focus on planning the event and editing the workbook because it was part of my (paid) research. Other group members faced a growing workload having to juggle teaching, their studies as well as a day job with the organizing work. Despite being aware of my privilege, I assumed a similar commitment from all others. I was frustrated when things did not move forward on the project ends others had taken responsibility for.

Questions of efficiency and unmeasurable labor

We also observed that within the existing institutional setting, our effort to do things differently and to investigate the institutional formats and habits was positively acknowledged and, to a certain degree, enthusiastically welcomed by Valand Academy's leadership. But it also caused friction with and drew critique by the same administration, because of the apparent extra labor, effort and time our project created for administrators – and therefore costs.

The question of economic feasibility became apparent when our extensive creative work of detailed organizing and care turned into self-exploitation and for some even into states of burn-out.[66] Collective work is by definition slow (because decisions are thoroughly discussed and take time) and expensive, if everyone is equally paid. The prevailing institutional economies are not equipped to afford collectivity and keep allocating tasks and roles to individuals, a proved and tested way to save wage costs. This results in the dilemma of people most likely going back to a "work to rule" practice within the established standard procedures. This could be seen as an act of self-care because they cannot afford to invest extra and unpaid labor. From the perspective of the institution, collective practice poses a problem of efficiency. Efficiency is a measurable concept – quantitatively determined by the ratio of useful output to total input.

From the perspective of intersectional, feminist practice, I would argue like this: These partly invisible practices of care are not related to regimes of authorship and, therefore, not distinctly measurable. They are invisible in the current regime of authorship and ownership. They constitute affective labor, which is sometimes valued and recognized by the direct recipients and beneficiaries, however the current systems of evaluation tend to fall short of acknowledging them formally. They are seen as the "fuzzy extra," which is nice to have, but not seen as fundamentally necessary to keep the machine going. They are not connected to authorship and therefore not recognized "as work."[67] How we could rethink organizing as a form of authorship is discussed in the chapter "Analysis": "From Output to Input," where I relate this conflict to normative evaluation frameworks of "impact" in current institutional environments. ⟶  See Analysis: A more flexible idea of authorship altogether

Similarly, when we apply the question of impact to the field of publishing, it becomes apparent that the value of a researcher's publishing practice is determined by a "logic of calculation." It is measured by sheer counting: the number of articles, the number of citations, the number of downloads: the more individually authored works - the more research points - the more money for the institution. Publications and authored documents have become an asset and a currency. In my view, this definition of "impact" is ridiculous and cynical, leading merely to "gaming the system." [reference] In the following, I will describe the specific approach in the production and circulation of the "Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy" workbook, that experiments how we could shift our understanding of impact by transforming the "output" into an "input."

Publishing strategies: contextual, contingent: the workbook

"Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy" workbook was published and circulated four weeks before the event. This timing seemed important, as the workbook's function was different from a conference program, merely giving factual info for the event with abstracts and info about the invited speakers. The workbook's purpose was to create a common ground, introduce the mobilization's topics and formats, and invite the wider academy community into the discussion BEFORE the event was staged.

In the field of publishing genres, the workbook has a specific function. It has a use-value. It is defined as a book made up of a series of problems or practice-examples mostly for a student to use as part of a course or study. In this sense, a workbook could also be seen as a prop, in the way Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe it: "If you pick it up you can move into some new thinking and into a new set of relations, a new way of being together, thinking together. In the end, it's this new way of being and thinking together that's important, not the prop."[68]

analog editorial, HDK-Valand, 2016

How we "can" be and think together constituted a crucial and ongoing question during the editorial process. We could work in a studio in the academy building during this period, where we laid out printouts of texts, met with potential contributors, got in touch with authors to ask for permission to include their work in the book. After weeks the floor of the studio was covered with sheets of texts, drawings, charts, comics, and photographs. The editorial decision was to NOT consolidate the vast range of material into one overall design. The workbook pages keep all visual traces from the contexts and sites we took them. They were exported from a blog, a website, or scanned from a printed book and, therefore, visually reference their source, including many different layouts and typographic designs quasi as assembled ready-mades. This analog editing method of testing the sequence of pages by rearranging them on the floor, adding metadata, names, and references via handwriting on post-its allowed all members of the group to look equally and together at the overall arrangement. Compared to the one person managing and making design decisions on an InDesign document, this working method was fun and constructive as it gathered all bodies equally in the room. Once the pages were ready and the sequence agreed, the sheets were manually scanned, whereby the final scan performed as the pagination tool.

In line with rethinking the formats of the event, it felt necessary to fundamentally re-imagine the modes of circulation for the workbook. The impact and discourse we hoped for could hardly be instigated through an act of "delivery," i.e., the distribution of a discrete finished object. Distribution is a rather technical and controlled act of delivering an object from a central point to known targets. Dissemination might come closer to the potential I am interested in exploring. It has the nuance of spreading amorphously or in an unstructured manner. It develops a life on its own with its temporalities and trajectories. Knowledge, for example, can in some way be disseminated, but hardly distributed. Dissemination's offer and scope are to instigate. Coming from Latin "semina," it suggests the spreading of a seed, which can grow and propagate. There is not the expectation of an immediate or technical effect. It is an offer. Seeds take their time: once when they find the right conditions, they germinate.

⟶  see project: Let's Mobilize Workbook: Public Assembling Day Extending Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledge, we don't only "speak" from within a situation formed by specific bodies and their social situation with its power relations – we attempted "to speak back to it." The experiments with the particular two-step dissemination of the workbook were such an attempt. Firstly the → Public Assembling Day created a social moment to introduce the questions, provocations, and topics within the community of our educational institution. Secondly, the act of spreading the posters across the walls of the academy building and by that turning the academy building into a → walkable book ⟶  see project: Let's Mobilize Workbook: Walkable Book we situated their content right inside the field of forces and disciplinary struggles of our day-to-day work environment at the academy.

Let's Mobilize, walkable book, HDK-Valand, 2016

Here, it is not the binding of the book with its technical function to fix the narrative of the pages in a given sequence – it is the reader's actual body on its daily trajectory through the workplace that creates the narrative. Teachers, students, administrators, alongside visiting guests, created a range of spatial, temporal meaning-making encounters with the book. It seems interesting to connect the event character of such situated reading practice with early Happenings (1958-61), and in particular, their relationship to objects. As Johanna Drucker points out, "the Happening was staged within an art context but as a situation and set of conditions for the interaction of individuals subject to certain material constraints. Initiated by an artist or artists, the situation served as vehicle and medium for such interrelations to be enacted and experienced but never reified", instead "the objects were elements with dubious object status and precious little formal value." As such, they were a means and not an end.[69]

What Drucker describes here connects back to the concept of a prop that shifts the emphasis from the object (publication) on what is mobilized (the agency), discussed earlier in this section. Two things are at stake here: Firstly Drucker describes the critical impact of Happenings "as a refusal of product-oriented materialism, a rejection of the signature terms of mastery, originality, and authorship" that was at stake in abstract painting at the time linking the individual artist directly to his/her finished work/product. I have discussed the complicated relationship between authorship, originality, and intellectual property that form the constituent elements of the modernist tradition in the text →["Confronting Authorship - Constructing practices. How copyright destroys collective practice"] outlining the blockages this triumvirate creates for collective intersectional knowledge practices.

Secondly, Drucker proposes that by replacing the commodity- and object-oriented character with instructions and scores, "with the "noise" of simultaneous and collective activity," the profoundly critical agency of Happenings relied upon the techniques of an orchestrated collaboration to stage a self-conscious condition for relations among individuals to be experienced as such." ⟶  see essay: Outside the Page - Making Social Realities with Books

Staging the posters of the book pages materially in the academy building that houses many different actors that meet in various roles and on different terms could be seen as a cue for a situated reading practice that I discuss in more detail in the text →"Outside the page - making social realities with books." The posters' materiality and sizes claim space and presence among the daily forces of encounters, discoveries, creations, articulations, anxieties, and disciplinary struggles and potentially turn into a transformative current, as one colleague wrote as feedback to the working group:

I loved the way you/the posters insisted upon me/the recipient to meet/contemplate its content before and in particular after the event. For one because these were texts "donated" or re-distributed by others, and then donated to me by you. But also because by hanging them in a room where I give myself a couple of minutes break from the everyday haze, you are creating the possibility not only for a first reading but then for a re-re-rediscovery and understanding. This placement can turn into a transformative current in itself because the content of the texts interrupts the thoughts of and thereby intertextualizes the everyday. (Kerstin Bergendahl)[70]Speechbubble.png
That this potentially transformative current is merely temporal was topic in a recent conversation with a group of Valand students (Publishing, Art Feminism) who shared their impression that for them the posters turned into mere decoration over time and apparently lost their initial ignition.

Annotated by EW

If these pages mobilized, the mobilization happened right in the center of the institution, or in Nora Sternfeld's words "in the in-between spaces that emerge between representation and presence, theory and practice, and above all between the current state of affairs and the possibility of changing it."[71]



Boxing and Unboxing – against immunization

SCUB
the Society for Cutting Up Boxes.
S. Society: a group of people
C. Cutting: to slice away notions and boundaries
U. Up: to be positive
B. Boxes: the thing in which restricts our thoughts and actions based on the square, cardboard and rigid structure that groups and sub-groups use to suffocate and close in persons' identities and/or non-identities
SCUB
SCUB is all for...
1. IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF LIFE
2. FASHION
3. COMMUNICATION
4. REVOLUTION
5. DESTRUCTION
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF LIFE: SCUB makes people walk down the street with ease and inspiration. In being liberated by SCUB, colors will look brighter, music will sound clearer and your dancing will be greater. More beer on the streets. "Children" will be able to frolic amongst their peers. When asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" they respond, "Me."
FASHION: Boring fashion will be shut down and re-opened with whatever YOU want.
COMMUNICATION: What happens when two boxes try to talk? Nothing, right? Time to cut up the boxes, NOW.
REVOLUTION: skill building with knives, scissors, razors, box-cutters, electric knives, saws of all sizes, teeth, long sharp nails, keys, shards of glass, cheese cutters and so on...
DESTRUCTION: why put up with identities when you can destroy them? Just to let you know, SCUB does not support the destruction of "animals" and their wood tree environments. Destroy.
BOX ME IN?
NO THANKYOU.
Rhani Lee Remedes, 'Society for cutting up boxes', The SCUB Manifesto, 2002


Boxing and Unboxing, the most recent of the discussed works, approaches the inquiry from a different site. It is the place of a boxing gym, a site of liveliness, bodily exhaustion, exhilaration, smell and sweat. Situated outside the immediate material and procedural protocols of publishing, Boxing and Unboxing tests strategies in which way boxes and related binaries could be "cut up" through transgressive bodily dialogue. "Boxing and Unboxing" unfolded during AND's research residency at Marabouparken Konsthall in Stockholm in 2018 and correlates two distinct activities, Boxing and "Unboxing." Besides thousands of youtube videos of proud owners of newly purchased goods, unboxing is commonly understood as an act of taking something out of its container or box. It could be the thing, as artist Rhani Lee Remedes suggests in her SCUB manifesto, "that restricts our thoughts and actions based on the square, cardboard and rigid structure that groups and sub-groups use to suffocate and close in persons' identities and/or non-identities."

The second activity, Boxing, is conventionally understood as a sport based on competition between two individuals who use physical force and technique to defeat one another in a combative situation in the ring. However, in the last few years, a number of boxing clubs opened that are not fitness- or business-oriented but socially and politically motivated. "United Voices of the World Union", a self-organized, London-based, campaigning migrant and precarious workers trade union has recently started boxing classes for its members. The organization engages in physical protests, occupations, and demonstrations stating: "The working class is kicking ass in court, in the workplace and in the ring."[72]

Or take as another case in point 'Solstar' (short for Solidarity Star), a left-wing inclusive gym based in North London that is run by female coaches' with the aim to build practical solidarity' by training together.[73] The organization offers boxing classes as a tool to prepare members for self-defense to fight potential police and right-wing aggression on the street. One should also mention Shadow Sistxrs, a group of women of color affiliated to gal-dem, a London based magazine run by women and non-binary people of color to reach independence from the biased representation through mainstream media. The organization has started Shadow Sistxrs Fight Club as a "Physical & Meta-Physical Self-Defence class for women, Non-Binary folk, and QTIPOC witches". The immediate trigger was recurring attacks on women during night hours on the streets surrounding Haringey's Warehouse District in North London.[74] These campaigns are not primarily based on traditional models of martial arts or gyms, or on making a profit by fighting for the entertainment of others. Instead, they provide an opportunity to learn self-defense, boost confidence and solidarity.

When AND Publishing was invited for a residency at Marabouparken Konsthall in Stockholm, the question was, in what way boxing training could be a method to learn how to relate to each other. Could boxing training expand our previous conceptions and experiences of collaboration and negotiation? Would it help to deal with conflict, anger, and transgression? Could it provide insights into practices of care and support by discovering our physical and emotional boundaries? Or to borrow from Ar Parmacek:" How can boxing, which is so focused on individual fighting against another individual, survival of the fittest and fastest, be used as a feminist, and/or creative tool? Where can the methods and strategies learned from boxing be critically and successfully applied to art, to writing, and to activism, and where might they rather end up doing harm?"[75]

Boxing Club – Sparring

⟶  see project: Boxing and UnboxingThe idea of organizing a boxing club emerged out of curiosity as to how boxing when defined as physical play and not as competition, might allow us to rehearse ways to relate to each other in other areas. Central to this undertaking was the shift in the concept of competition highlighted by performance scholar and martial art practitioner Janet O'Shea. She observes in her book "Making Play Work: Competition, Spectacle, and Intersubjectivity in Hybrid Martial Arts" that martial arts entail elements of competitive pleasure and competitive spectacle. Competitive spectacle hinges on an outcome, i.e. winning or losing, she writes, whereas competitive play "highlights the physical, contestatory, and exploratory interactions between people" a view that resists a "societal overemphasis on winning" as too much attention to winning turns sports into work.[76]

⟶  see book chapter: Confronting Authorship, Constructing PracticesIt's interesting to connect O'Shea's observations with questions on outcomes and authorship raised in other parts of this Ph.D. inquiry - for instance in the book chapter "Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices" examining the relationship between 'verb' (practice) and 'noun' (outcome), and the blockages produced by the regime of authorship of individually authored outcomes.⟶  see input: Collective Situated Authorship at Authors of the Future study day, Constant Brussels, 2019. Initially, I was not able to articulate the actual affinities, overlaps, and connections to my overall Ph.D. inquiry. However, on reflection, it becomes apparent, that the way we organized and set up the boxing training, dealt with exploring the pleasure of competitive physical play while not buying into the notion of the fixed outcome such as fighting for victory or defeat. Still, competing without aiming to win is a contradiction.

Sparring, for example, illuminates the many ways in which bodily interaction differentiates itself from fight and violence. Part of the experimental learning in the boxing classes was that we constantly changed sparring partners, requiring an immediate adaptation to your partner's body size, weight, ability, and tactics. It meant instantaneous navigation between your partners' vulnerability and force, fierceness, and speed. O'Shea describes sparring as moments where 'nobody declares a winner, no-one keeps a score, nobody is watching. In sparring, we compete without needing to win and can disagree with respect'.[77]

This is why I refer to sparring "partner" and not "opponent". The sparring can be described as an exercise of intersubjective exchange, a process of action and reaction, adaption and anticipation. This unconditional alertness to your partner's moves, either triggering attack or defense, constructs a unique interdependent relationship. It is as you were moving together. You are working together while competing. For example, we spent lots of time rehearsing defense tactics by learning to anticipate your partner's moves to either block the punches or evade them. There are, to give an example, two ways to confront a quick right-hand jab: you either block it with your gloved fist, or you duck under it, letting it hit the void. The exhilaration I experienced during the sparring sessions, had to do with the necessity to act on my feet. The mantra of our boxing teacher was: "Don't overthink. Be present. Always maintain eye contact with your opponent. Stay focussed." Indeed the moment you were trying to make sense of what is happening you get dragged away and miss out.

Sparring – transgressing identity categories

It is interesting that while being on the mat, it did not matter who you are, who your parents are, where you were born, what color your skin is, what you have achieved in your profession or gained other merits or authority. All that was left in the changing room. Artist Anna Zett describes this loss of predefined identity in her film "Theory of Everything (Circuit Training)" as "I have no name, no gender, I do not listen to anyone's prayers, I speak no language, I have no genealogy."[78] Instead, what matters in this moment is your vulnerability and your ability to interact with your partner. While this account describes the experiences made in our informal self-organized boxing classes, the systems of professional boxing and their marketization are loaded with identity politics carrying out fights between religions, values, and races.[79]

Sparring - rules, trust, enjoyment

From the beginning, we had to trust each other that everyone will be sticking to the rules. The rules were the basic agreement for getting on the mat with people you have never met before and the intention to punch each other. O'Shea points out that "Sports are games and games are about paradox. In a game, we have a goal, but we have rules in play that make it harder to achieve that goal. We follow the rules in order to sustain the state of play because it is enjoyable."[80] [more here: Rules for inclusive meetings?]

Sparring - learning as "the beginning of something"

It seems paradoxical, but in my experience, the boxing classes, the playful and combative contact between each other yielded an extraordinary sense of trust and support without knowing each other. Because participants were more or less beginners it was a common journey without many parades of already acquired expertise. The feedback of participants reflected on the importance of being invited into a safe space to learn something new.[81] Ar Parmacek, an intern at Marabouparken at the time, reflects on this aspect in more detail:

"Throughout the entire period of boxing training, the exciting atmosphere of beginning affected every-thing. Even as someone who observed, for the most part, I felt that I was in the middle of a beginning of something every session. At the beginning of a collective and individual learning experience, witnessing other's beginnings; beginning to box, beginning to know each other, beginning to get to know the space, and so on.
I realise how much I miss this particular joy. How rare it is, at least in adult life, to access the joy of beginning something, be it a skill, a friendship, taking a route to a new place, seeing a new part of the city, etc. etc. This also made me think about how beginnings like these are full of joy because they are still open. Roles haven't yet been 100% cemented. (Maybe they can't solidify for as long as the beginning and position of beginner last? The cemented roles, in other words, mark the end of a beginning?) Activities haven't yet become laden with expectations of advancing, of growing pressure. Professionalism. These things circulate, hover above our heads, for sure, but it feels like as long as the beginning state is present they can't take over. Being a beginner in this context allowed for mistakes and for laughter, not sideways glances or reprimands."[75]

Sparring – transgressing identity categories

On the mat, it did not matter who you are, who your parents are, where you were born, what color your skin is or what you have achieved in your profession, what your identity, merits, class, profession, and authority are. You left all this in the changing room and were leveled counterparts. Artist Anna Zett describes this loss of predefined identity in her film Theory of Everything (Circuit Training) as "I have no name, no gender, I do not listen to anyone's prayers, I speak no language, I have no genealogy" [3] Instead, what matters in this moment is your vulnerability and your ability to interact with your partner. While this account describes the experiences made in our informal self-organized boxing classes, the systems of professional boxing and their marketization are loaded with identity politics carrying out fights between religions, values, and races.[79]

"Leaving everything behind" meant for us, the artist organizers, that we did not take on the role and authority of the artist-curator. This liberating moment allowed us to be equal learners on the gym mat and to hand over the responsibility to the boxing teachers. Actually, it hardly occurred to anyone in the boxing class, that the training was organized and funded by an art institution. We introduced the project as part of Marabouparken Guestroom residency and were keen to keep this experiment as autonomous as possible, because – as already explained - we were wary of it becoming an "art piece" with all its complicated framing and conceptual load.

Boxing and Unboxing – against immunization and the figure of the "proper"

[this needs more work: Isabell Lorey] As I described above, the Boxing and Unboxing experiment conceived boxing not as a concept of masculinity and violence or the survival of the fittest, but as a moment of intense negotiation of border space, contagion, and border linking. In the following, I will reflect in which way this practice-based inquiry might serve as a technique to unlearn the building blocks of possessive individualism and the figure of the "proper." Possessive individualism is a critique of modern liberal-democratic theory formulated by Canadian political theorist M.B. MacPherson in his book "The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke" published by Oxford University Press in 1962. Revisiting political theories of the seventeenth century (Hobbes and Locke), MacPherson suggests "that the difficulties of modern liberal-democratic theory lie deeper than had been thought, that the original seventeenth-century individualism contained the central difficulty, which lay in its possessive quality. Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as a part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself."[82] But exactly because the concept of the proper arguably is in crisis in our contemporary moment, it is paradoxically stronger and stronger enforced by individuals, communities, and the state as political theorists Bird and Greg claim. They observe that "in our hyper-globalized world the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis." Because "everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation, be it wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, or political and economic turmoil. [...] There is, accordingly, nothing that can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself." They herewith identify a crisis of the proper on which the Western Modern project is being built. As a consequence, they state that today "we are witnessing ever more drastic assertions of the essentiality of "propriety" (in the form of religious or socially conservative resurgence), "property" (in the form of highly concentrated but unstable regimes of capitalist accumulation), and/or "authenticity" (in the form of competing claims of idiomatic identity or questions of autonomous decision-making powers).[83]

Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has provided challenging concepts on the figure of the "proper" and the related processes of immunization in his writings about communitas.[84] I will discuss Esposito's inquiry of communitas and immunitas later on in the chapter "Analysis". Here, I will very summarily explain his critique of the "proper subject" in order to think through in which way Esposito's category of immunization –– that as he claims "is so important that it can be taken as explicative key of the entire modern paradigm" –– can be used as a hook to reflect on the transgressive, exhilarating and troubling experience of the boxing experiments.

"Modern individuals truly become that, the perfect individual, the "absolute" individual, bordered in such a way that they are isolated and protected, but only if they are freed in advance from the debt that binds them one to the other; if they are released from, exonerated, or relieved of that contact, which threatens their identity, exposing them to possible conflict with their neighbor, exposing them to the contagion of the relation with others."[85] This "perfect individual", the figure of the "proper", is defined by property, that what belongs to me: my identity, my ethnicity, my land. Each of these spheres turns into "a form of property that must be immunised, often in contradictory ways, from external appropriation" by producing boundaries and exclusionary mechanisms.[83]

In a similar vein, Esposito relates the category of the proper in order to critique notions of the commons and community as exercised by communitarians and the recently very active revival of the commons. He observes the just described processes of immunization against alterity in models of community whose membership is staked exclusively on each owner's claim over their commonality. "What each has in common is "proper" only to those who belong to community." ("Community, Immunity, Biopolitics"). In contrast to this widespread understanding of community, Esposito argues, community is "what is not one's own, or what is unable to be appropriated by someone" (49). Community can only be experienced as a "loss, removal, or expropriation" because it voids one's identity rather than fulfills it. This is a very abbreviated pitch of Esposito's conception of a common, that is not characterized "by what is proper, but by what is improper, or even more drastically, by the other, by a voiding […] of property into its negative; by removing what is properly one's own that inverts and decenters the proprietary subject, forcing [her/] him to take leave of himself, to alter himself […] The community isn't a mode of being, much less a "making" of the individual subject. It is not the subject's expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it inside out: a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject." [86]

While Esposito's inquiry into community sounds rather theoretical in connection to a bunch of self-defining women throwing first boxing punches at each other, it is helpful to understand and articulate boxing's transgressive nature: to expose oneself to hit and being hit. It can be described as a moment of "border-swerving, border-linking and border-spacing" between the I and non-I, that Bracha L. Ettinger elaborates from a psychoanalytical perspective.[87] The boxing renders permeable the borderlines of our "proper" subjects. As a nonverbal bodily dialogue, it transgresses the very boundaries that we elsewhere seek to protect. During sparring I deliberately forgo this established immunity – my contours become vulnerable through the mutuality of the touch: My fist touches and is being touched at the same time.

What's next

Just to recap, chapter (3) "Survey of the field" mapped the range of practices done by others. These practices create a wider context for my inquiry. Chapter (4) describes the projects, I have carried out - most of them in collaboration with others. Chapter (10), the one you are reading at the moment, reflects and theorizes on the practice projects. The following chapter (11) "Analysis" revisits the initial research questions and distills a range of topics, struggles, double-binds that emerged from the five practice projects. The following chapter also analyzes the experiment of writing a Ph.D. thesis on a wiki that to some extent challenges the dominant assumptions that a Ph.D. is an individually authored, original contribution to knowledge.

Notes: Reflection, theorization of projects

  1. OOMK (One Of My Kind) is an art collective and biannual publication run by Heiba Lamara, Sofia Niazi and Rose Nordin. OOMK ZINE explores themes surrounding women, art and activism engaging particularly with the work of women of color and faith. Heiba Lamara, Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin, The Library Was (London, BookWorks, 2017). Download pdf
  2. See Chris Atton, "The infoshop: the alternative information centre of the 1990s", New Library World Volume 100, No 1146, Bingley, MCB University Press (Emerald), 1999, pp. 24–29; and Chris Atton, "Infoshops in the Shadow of the State," Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World, edited by N. Couldry & J. Curran, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2003, pp. 57–69, page 58.
  3. Alison Flood, "Britain has closed almost 800 libraries since 2010, figures show", The Guardian, Dec 6, 2019
  4. It is interesting to observe that the printed posters and their online versions that circulated in my immediate environment at Valand Academy triggered much interest and, therefore, contributions. The community of practice at the art academy as an environment of shared interests was critical as a vehicle for bonding trust. People who already knew me personally or knew about my work felt appealed to contribute. (My position within the institution, as a doctoral researcher, also provided some degree of respect or even authority, which people felt they could trust and rely on.) Besides, a large number of contributions arrived from people who worked with me previously or knew of my involvement with AND Publishing and The Piracy Project in London. It seems that both characteristics, my position as a doctoral researcher employed at the art academy as well as my previous work provided some context and legitimization.
  5. Gary Hall, Digitize This book! – The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, page 81.
  6. Emily Roysdon and Katie Geha, "Interview with Emily Roysdon," Glasstire, Texas, 11 Nov 2012. https://glasstire.com/2012/11/11/interview-with-emily-roysdon/ See also Ecstatic Resistance, exhibition and publication, Tensta Konsthall Stockholm, 2009 and Grand Arts, Kansas City, 2010.
  7. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989, page 48.
  8. Emily Drabinski, "Teaching the Radical Catalog," Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front, edited by K.R. Roberto (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008): 198.
  9. Hope A. Olson, "Sameness and Difference – A Cultural Foundation of Classification," Library Resources & Technical Services, Vol 45, No 3, July 2001, pp. 115-22, page 115. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/lrts.45n3.115
  10. Emily Drabinski, Radical Catalog, 198.
  11. Ibid, 201.
  12. Charles A. Cutter, Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue, 4th ed. London: Library Association, (1904) 1962. Cited from Hope A. Olson, "The Power to Name, Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries," Signs, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 2001), The University of Chicago Press, pp. 639-668, page 641.
  13. Melvil Dewey, Decimal Clasification and Relative Index, 13th edition, Essex County, New York, Forest Press, 1932, page 14.
  14. Melvil Dewey, Decimal Clasification and Relative Index, page 43. Dewey applied his urge for efficiency also to a proposed spelling reform, as the unusual spelling of this paragraph indicates. He explains in length that as president of the Efficiency Socyety and of the National Institute of Efficiency, and as chairman of the committee of each on "Efficiency in English writn and spokn" there was an "almost unanimous agreement as to imperativ need for radical improvement [...] and a urjent need of speling reform." He identifies that English language has 40 sounds, but over 500 symbols or combinations to represent these 40 sounds, a fact that according to Dewey, cries for simplification. Likewise Dewey complains that the Webster Dictionary identifies 30 ways in which the name "Shakespeare" is being spelled. To tackle this "criminal waste of money and skool time" he came up with a long list of rules to simplify the use of vowels and consonants. Dewey also demonstrates clear colonial tendencies, when he lays out that "English is betr fitted than any other languaj for universal use." Due to its simple grammar, it has all the properties to become the "world languaj." Melvil Dewey, Decimal Clasification and Relative Index, 49-63.
  15. Classified Illustrated Catalog of the Library Bureau, a handbook of library and office fittings and supplies, Library Bureau, 146 Franklin St., Boston, 1890. https://archive.org/details/classifiedillus06buregoog/mode/2up.
  16. Hope A. Olson, "The Power to Name, Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries," Signs, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 2001), The University of Chicago Press, pp. 639-668, page 641.
  17. The ten main groups are: 000–099, general works; 100–199, philosophy and psychology; 200–299, religion; 300–399, social sciences; 400–499, language; 500–599, natural sciences and mathematics; 600–699, technology; 700–799, the arts; 800–899, literature and rhetoric; and 900–999, history, biography, and geography. These ten main groups are, in turn, subdivided again and again to provide more specific subject groups. Within each main group, the principal subseries are divided by 10; e.g., the history of Europe is placed in the 940s. Further subdivisions eventually extend into decimal numbers; e.g., the history of England is placed under 942, the history of the Stuart period at 942.06, and the history of the English Commonwealth at 942.063. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Dewey-Decimal-Classification.
  18. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan outlines the "Five Laws of Library Science."
    1. Books are for use.
    2. Every reader his [or her] book.
    3. Every book its reader. 4. Save the time of the user.
    5. The library is a growing organism.”
    Ranganathan, S. R., Five Laws of Library Science, Madras, The Madras Library Association, 1931. Digitized, Hathi Trust Digital, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b99721&view=2up&seq=12. See also David Senior, "Infinite Hospitality," in Every Day the Urge Grows Stronger to Get Hold of an Object at Very Close Range by Way of Its Likeness, New York: Dexter Sinister, 2008. See also Eva Weinmayr, "Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community," Publishing as Artistic Practice, edited by Annette Gilbert, Berlin/New York: Sternberg, 2016, pp. 166-67.
  19. Dewey, Decimal Clasification and Relative Index, page 21.
  20. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Boston, Beacon Press, 1988, page 144.
  21. Spelman, Inessential Woman, page 146.
  22. Gayatry Chakravarty Spivak, Death of aa Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 21.
  23. Gayatry Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 17.
  24. Karen Di Franco, "The Library Medium," in Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating, edited by Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr (London: AND Publishing, 2014) 81.
  25. In her book "Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples" Linda Tuhiwai Smith provides a crucial critique of Western paradigms of research and knowledge in indigenous contexts. Speaking as Maori women, a people that are extensively researched by Western humanities, she cautions "a perception of research as something that is done to people by outsiders and from which there is no apparent positive outcome." See Linda Tuhiwai Smith Decolonizing Methodologies, Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, Zed Books, 1999), Foreword, xi.
  26. As a historical note, it is interesting that 40 years earlier, not far from the Byam Shaw School of Art site in North London, students and staff of Hornsey College of Arts occupied their school in spring 1968 demanding a radical rethinking and reorganization of art education. During this six-day sit-in, students and associated staff took control over the entire building - including its kitchen and switch-board - and produced a range of demands and manifestos that have been described as the starting point for an entire student protest movement across the UK. On 28 May 1968, the Student Action Committee (S.A.C.) called for an all-night meeting over the freezing of the Union funds by the school's Bursar. Unlike earlier protests such as against the planned merger with Middlesex University that petered eventually out, this particular call to action resulted in a six-day sit-in that had been forcibly ended by police intervention. A multiplicity of papers, declarations, proposals, and requests that were circulated through independent channels and the press originated from these 24hrs meetings ranging from concrete changes how to run the courses to the demand of representation in boards and selection committees to the conceptualizations of new learning outcomes. It's a profound and fundamental rethinking of what art education should be is highlighted in one of the published manifestos:
    1. A person who designs should be a person who is capable of having meaningful relationships; a person with imagination; a person with insight into and an understanding of the world around him, and an ability to communicate.
    2. This individual should have these qualities first, and be a designer (or anything else) second.
    3. The fact that he may direct himself and his capabilities within a particular limited context (i.e., design) should be purely incidental.
    4. However, if this "designer" does not have these qualities, he will not be able to relate what he produces to his social environment, and hence to himself.

    in: "The Hornsey Affair," by students and staff of Hornsey College of Art, London: Penguin Education Special, 1969.
  27. In his essay "Life amongst the pirates," Daniel Alarcón reports from his visits to Peru's notorious pirate book markets in Lima that according to the author can sell three times as many copies of a book as the authorized publishers can. 'Oscar Colchado Lucio, one of a handful of Peruvian writers who actually make their living from book sales, told me of the time he’d gone to the town of Huancayo to do a reading at a very poor school. He signed some 300 books without coming across a single original. The authorized version simply wasn’t available – there were no bookstores in Huancayo.' In some cases, Alarcón explains, 'pirates have rescued work by writers the formal industry has forgotten. For example, the story of Luis Hernández, 'a little- known avant-garde poet with a cult following among university students. Photocopied versions of his out-of-print collections have been passed around for years, but no publisher had bothered to reissue his work – until a vendor from downtown Lima recognized the need, partnered with a press and came out with his own, unauthorized edition.' As Alarcón mentions, some texts get abbreviated, a few chapters arbitrarily taken out to save printing costs - without saying. The possibility of such unacknowledged modifications triggered our imagination. But Alarcón also describes an interesting tension: On one level, there is a somehow romantic idea of 'a poor, developing country with a robust informal publishing industry, the pirate as a cultural entrepreneur, a Robin Hood figure, stealing from elitist multinational publishers and taking books to the people. The myth is seductive and repeated often: book piracy in Peru, the story goes, responds to a hunger for knowledge in a country that throughout its history has been violently divided between a literate upper class and the poor, unlettered masses.' And on the other level the pirates' ruthless capitalist operations. Alarcón recounts how the state infiltrated the pirate book markets to control what is being printed. As a cultural artifact, the book has undeniable power that was used by the Fujimori government to fight its critics - most prominently novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who had run for president but lost by a slight margin. After the Fujimori administration dissolved the congress and announced to rewrite the constitution in 1992, Llosa declared him a dictator in his weekly column in El Pais - a characterization that instigated Fujimori to silence Vargas Llosa. The government invested in large scale into pirate presses and swamped the markets with state friendly, uncritical literature - giving Vargas Llosa's publishers a hard time to survive. As Alarcón states, 'over the next few years, book piracy became a project of the state.' Daniel Alarcon, "Life amongst the pirates," Granta 109: Work, 14 Jan 2010. https://granta.com/life-among-the-pirates
  28. The library space was used for a range of activities that go beyond printed books, such as for an artist residency, for yoga classes in between the bookshelves, as an assembly room, a chill-out space, for book launches, self-organized lectures, and workshops. Students and staff signed up to work inside the library to avoid that the books walk away and managed a simple book lending scheme.
  29. The Showroom, a publicly funded art space in London, offered to host TPP right after the books had to leave the art school library space. Funded by an Arts Council grant, TPP organized a series of workshops and debates at the Showroom in spring 2013, next to an accessible Piracy Project Reading Room during Showroom opening hours.[1].
  30. It might be no coincidence that Roland Barthes’ seminal short essay "Death of the Author" is published in Aspen Magazine in 1967, the same time when the Xerox photocopy machine has become widely used in libraries and offices. See Eva Hemmungs Wirtén "The Death of the Author and the Killing of Books: Assault by Machine," in No Trespassing, Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights and the Boundaries of Globalization, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 57-75.
  31. Hemmungs-Wirtén, Eva. No Trespassing, Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights and the Boundaries of Globalization, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004. Marshall McLuhan, "Address at Vision 65, New Challenges for Human Communications", Southern Illinois University, 21-23 Oct 1965, Essential McLuhan, edited by E. McLuhan and F. Zingrone, New York, BasicBooks, pp. 216, 1995.
  32. Think of Riot Grrrl, in Kate Eichorn's words, "a movement defined by an explosive repertoire of gestures, styles, performances, rallying cries, and anonymous confessions reproduced on copy machines." Kate Eichhorn, Archival turn in Feminism, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2013, page 9.
  33. Joseph Redwood-Martinez (ed.), An Incomplete Reader for the Ongoing Project, "One day, everything will be free… v 0.1.8", Istanbul, SALT Research & AND Public London, 2012. The early releases include interviews with Regine Basha, Celine Condorelli, Katya Sander, and Carey Young, as well as texts by Michel Bauwens, İsmail Ertürk, David Graeber, Lawrence Liang, Matteo Pasquinelli, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Dieter Roelstraete, Joshua Simon and Slavoj Žižek—but this is always already subject to change. The update to version 0.1.7 of the reader includes the addition of interviews with artists Carey Young and Annika Eriksson, texts by Alexandru Balasescu, Federica Bueti, Eva Weinmayr, and an artist project by Burak Delier. Download book
  34. See the Piracy Project catalog: Neil Chapman, Deleuze, Proust and Signs, http://andpublishing.org/PublicCatalogue/PCat_record.php?cat_index=69
  35. Of course, unconventional publications can and are being collected, but these are often more arty objects, flimsy, oversized, undersized, etc., and frequently end up in the Special Collections section, framed and categorized "as different" from the main stack of the collections.
  36. Camille Bondon, Jacques Rancière: le mâitre ignorant, Piracy Project catalog. http://andpublishing.org/PublicCatalogue/PCat_record.php?cat_index=19. Rancière’s pedagogical proposal suggests that "the most important quality of a schoolmaster is the virtue of ignorance." (Rancière, 2010, page 1). In his book "The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation," Jacques Rancière uses the historical case of the French teacher Joseph Jacotot, who was exiled in Belgium and taught French classes to Flemish students whose language he did not know and vice versa. Reportedly he gave his students a French text to read alongside its translation and, without mediation or explanation, let the students figure out the relationship between the two texts themselves. By intentionally using his ignorance as a teaching method, Rancière claims, Jacotot removed himself as the center of the classroom, as the one who knows. This teaching method arguably destabilizes the hierarchical relationship of knowledge (between student and teacher) and, therefore, "establishes equality as the center of the educational process." Annette Krauss, "Sites for Unlearning: On the Material, Artistic and Political Dimensions of Processes of Unlearning," Ph.D., Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2017, p. 113. Jacques Rancière, "Education, Truth and Emancipation," London, Continuum, 2010; Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford University Press California, 1987.
  37. Carys J. Craig, ‘Symposium: Reconstructing the Author-Self: Some Feminist Lessons for Copyright Law’, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 15. 2 (2007):224.
  38. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 142.
  39. One of the more notorious cases includes the litigation between photographer Patrick Cariou vs Richard Prince that began in 2009 and took several years with an unexpected outcome, that I analyze in the submitted book chapter "Confronting Authorship - Constructing Practices", In Whose Book is it Anyway? A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity, edited by Janis Jefferies and Sarah Kember (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), 267-308.
  40. Patricia Aufderheide; Peter Jaszi; Bryan, Bello; Tijana, Milosevic; "Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report", New York: College Art Association, 2014.
  41. The advising scholars and lawyers were Lionel Bently (Professor of Intellectual Property at the University of Cambridge), Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento (Art and Law, New York), Prodromos Tsiavos (Head of Digital Development at the Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, at the time Legal Project Lead for Creative Commons, England, Wales, and Greece).
  42. The legal concept of fair use has been introduced to allow for copyright exceptions in order to balance the interests of exclusive right holders with the interests of users and the public for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. "In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." US Copyright Act of 1976, amended 2016, https://www.copyright.gov/title17/
  43. See "A Day at the Courtroom," Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating, edited by Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr, London, AND Publishing, pp.91-133, 2014. Download book
  44. Carys J. Craig, "Symposium: Reconstructing the Author-Self: Some Feminist Lessons for Copyright Law," American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, 15, No. 2, (2007):246.
  45. See Joe Karaganis (ed), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, Social Science Research Council (2011)Download: https://monoskop.org/images/f/f6/Karaganis_Joe_ed_Media_Piracy_in_Emerging_Economies_2011.pdf, see also http://piracy.americanassembly.org/.
  46. Femke Snelting (Constant) circulated a letter to the participants of the research project "Interfacing the Law," (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, 2019) as a response to the Custodians Online letter "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub" (2015) and Letter "Alexandra Elbakyan to Mr. Robert W. Sweet" (2015). See letters here: http://constantvzw.org/w/?u=https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Interfacing_the_law
  47. In an open-ended reader, published by AND Publishing in 2014, each of the terms will be explored over time from different perspectives and fields of knowledge. Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating [2] is an open-ended book, that develops over time. The first version included a range of essays, while other chapters were still to be written and terms to be explored. It was an attempt to use the publication to initiate thinking and have the thinking feeding back into the book. This approach was supported by the inventive funding model. People bought shares in the essay (exploring one of the terms) they wanted to be written and thus financed the prospective author fee. In the end, however, we never managed to publish a further version of this book. We were super excited about the idea of ongoingness, but practicalities, the shift of interests as well as precarity directed our energies to new projects and occupations. Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating edited by Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr (London: AND Publishing, 2014)
  48. Ramon Lobato, "The Paradoxes of Piracy," Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp.121-123.
  49. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, New York, Zone Books, 2009, page 35.
  50. See Gary Hall, Pirate Philosophy, for a Digital Posthumanities (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016), 16. And"Etymology of Pirate", English Words of (Unexpected) Greek Origin, 2 Mar 2012, http://ewonago.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/etymology-of-pirate [accessed 14 February 2018].
  51. It is important to note that The Piracy project catalog lists the pirate as the author of the (pirate) book, followed by the source, and the strategy in order to describe the relationship between the three. Based on the questions the framing and cataloging raised we organized a cataloging workshop "Putting the Piracy Collection on the shelf" at Grand Union in Birmingham, where we experimented with the help of archivist Karen DiFranco, with new cataloging terms for selected cases in the collection. See https://grand-union.org.uk/gallery/putting-the-piracy-collection-on-the-shelves/
  52. The choice to group the pirate books according to their modes of distribution was informed by the one-month workshop we organized as part of the Piracy Reading at Kunstverein Munich - researching, visiting, collaborating with independent publishers, bookshops, archives located in Munich that operate off the mainstream and developed alternative ways of distribution. See pamphlet produced by participants of the workshop "One Publishes to Find Comrades", Kunstverein Munich, Nov 2014. See publication documenting this local archive research http://wiki.evaweinmayr.com/images/7/71/Piracy_Project_Kunstverein_Munich_One_publisheds_to_find_comrades%E2%80%93publication%E2%80%93lres.pdf
  53. Di Franco refers to Abi Warburg’s (1866–1929) unfinished "Mnemosyne Project" and Marion Mitchell Stancioff (1903–1994) "Lost Language" index card project, claiming that the "Warburg Institute looks not to follow standards but to set them, testing the fixed nature of standardization with material that moves across art historical boundaries." See Karen Di Franco, "The Library Medium", Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating, edited by Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr, London, AND Publishing, 2014, pp. 77-90, page 80.Download pdf
  54. During the first two years the project was embedded into the daily practice of an art college community. It drew inspiration from people regularly popping in, joining the workshops or coming to the lectures. Many incidental chats and encounters took place in the corridors, in the yard or café, which contributed immensely to the project – indirectly and socially – just through daily presence. When the library was eventually closed (and converted to offices) we moved the pirated books to The Showroom in London, a publicly funded art space, which is invested in stretching the boundaries of traditional gallery work by focusing on collaborative and process-driven approaches as well as building relationships to local groups in its neighborhood. This one-year residency at the Showroom allowed us to conceptualize a new set of events, apply for funding and get to know the new situation. AND publishing also run evening self-publishing courses Working in the Edges over a couple of months, which helped to connect to and develop publishing practices and discourse in the Showroom community. However, once we progressed and were invited by several art institutions to set up temporary reading rooms (mostly for a one-month period) our work tended to become more of a deliverable, a service.
  55. Teaching to Transgress Toolbox (TTTT) is a collaboration between HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, École de Récherche Graphique (erg) in Brussels, and Institut Superieure des Beaux-Arts (ISBA) in Besancon to collectively address questions of inclusive learning and teaching in an environment, where tendencies towards polarisation and discrimination in wider society have a perceptible influence on attitudes and behaviors within education, and in our classrooms. In an attempt to meet these contemporary threats to diversity, questions about pedagogical inclusivity have risen to the forefront. Critical intersectional feminist pedagogies have, by now, been proven to provide valuable conceptual and practical tools with which to focus on inclusivity. Intersectionality asserts that oppressions (based on racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. This is particularly true in the field of art, where teaching is known to be open to devising and applying new critical frameworks, tools of analysis, and creative practices. The program seeks to foster inclusive pedagogies, and question the so-called neutrality and equality in systems of schooling, production and consumption in the arts. How can people from various backgrounds, fields, abilities, gender identification, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion collectively explore how intersectional and de-colonial approaches can activate and spread embodied and theoretical knowledges. http://www.ttttoolbox.net/
  56. Philippe Kinoo, "Autorités, pouvoirs, décisions, responsabilités dans une institution," Qu'estce qui fait autorité dans les institutions médicosociales?, ERES, 2007.
  57. Some recent discourse examples include: Transmediale, Berlin, 2019, "Affective Infrastructures", https://transmediale.de/content/study-circle-affective-infrastructures. "New Institutionalism," "Organisational Aesthetics” (Olga Gorianova, 2018). See also How Institutions Think, edited by Paul O'Neill, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2017. Building on sociologist Mary Douglas' book with the same name (Syracuse University Press, 1986) exploring institutional politics from the perspective of art, curatorial, educational, and research practices.
  58. 58.0 58.1 58.2 Andrea Francke, Ross Jardine, "Bureaucracy’s Labour: The Administrator as Subject in Management, Parse Issue 5, Univesity of Gothenburg, Spring 2017.
  59. See "Rethinking the art school," a conversation between Laurence Rassel, currently director of École de Récherche Graphique (erg) in Brussels and Cornelia Sollfrank, Creating Commons, ZHdK Zürich, 2018. http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/rethinking-the-art-school/
  60. We also discussed in a meeting with the prefect possible precedences, such as Serpentine Gallery Marathon in London to have arguments in the case the superordinate university procurement would ask questions.
  61. While being aware of some administrators' support, it was difficult to receive consistent information on what could and could not be done within the remit of the various academic procurement policies. The bits of information provided were fairly vague. This left us sometimes in a state of uncertainty, constant guessing, and relying on hearsay. We were always hoping, but never really knowing — this created tension within the group as well as with the administration. We found ourselves also affected by anxieties that "this will not be possible" as the inflexibility of the administrative apparatus might not allow this to happen. For example, just three days before the event, we received an email from an administrator stating that preparing food for 120 people in the academy building would breach the Health and Safety regulations of the university. Two days later another administrator brought us – as a gesture of acknowledgment and support – a monstrous squash vegetable home-grown in her garden to cook for the communal dinner.
  62. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, 2nd edition. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
  63. 63.0 63.1 In this text, written one year after the event, the working group reflected on the process, hopes, and results of the mobilization by revisiting and commenting on the original text "Mapping the concepts and ways of working for Let's Mobilize" Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy workbook, September 2016, HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Download draft text.
  64. Johanna Gustavsson and Lisa Nyberg, MFK Manual, Malmö Free University for Women, 2011. http://www.lisanyberg.net/do-the-right-thing-a-manual-from-mfk/
  65. Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Why organizations need some structure to ensure they are democratic," 1972. http://struggle.ws/hist_texts/structurelessness.html.
  66. "I do always wonder how as hosts, undertaking so much care work and logistical preparations, we are able to engage with everyone and the discussions without burning out?" Frances Stacey, Collective Gallery Edinburgh, email 1 May 2017
  67. "First of all, I want to express my deep gratitude and joy for the Femped mobilization. Thank you for arranging this fantastic event! It was inviting, relaxed, intelligent, critical, playful, generous. It was also wonderful to meet all these people in this setting - I think it made everyone go off-guard. Even though the atmosphere was friendly and allowing, there was also room for criticality - especially during the Thursday session before lunch. That was very valuable! [...] If femped is to serve as a role model for the Academy - and in many regards, it should - I cannot stress enough that the work required to arrange an event needs to be acknowledged by the institution as work. Anything else is unsustainable, unethical, and excluding. To define what work is and how it is valued has occupied feminism for decades." Ann-Charlotte Glasberg Blomquist, Lecturer Valand Academy, email 15 Nov 2016
  68. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson, Minor Compositions, 2013, page 106.
  69. Joanna Drucker, "Collaboration without Object(s) in the Early Happenings," Art Journal, Winter 1993, pp. 51-58, page 55.
  70. Kerstin Bergendahl, a teacher colleague at Valand Academy in an email to the organizers of Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?, quoted in Andreas Engman, Eva Weinmayr, Mary Coble, Rose Borthwick "Revisiting Let’s Mobilize," in Decolonialism after the educational turn, Black Dog Publishing (forthcoming).
  71. Nora Sternfeld, "Para-Museum of 100 Days: documenta between Event and Institution", On Curating, Issue 33, Zürich, 2017, page 166.
  72. See United Voices of the World Union: https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/.
  73. See Solstar: https://solstarsports.org/
  74. See gal-dem Shadow Sistxrs: http://gal-dem.com/shadow-sistxrs-learning-protect-soul/
  75. 75.0 75.1 Ar Parmacek, "Ar’s preparing for text - Selection of some of AND’s initial questions,"Boxing and Unboxing Calendar, London, AND Publishing, Stockholm: Marabouparken Konsthall, 2018, page 71.
  76. Janet O'Shea, Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training, Oxford University Press, 2018.
  77. Janet O'Shea refers to sparring as a technique to learn to compete and collaborate at the same time. O'Shea "Beyond Winning.
  78. Anna Zett "Theory of Everything (Circuit Training)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4NSM4aBnc0.
  79. 79.0 79.1 One example would be Cashius Clay turned Muhammed Ali vocally turning his fights into symbolic battles between races as well as Islamism and Western values. Another example relates to systems of authorization in professional championship boxing in the UK: Winston Churchill in his role as UK home secretary called of the interracial fight between black British boxer Jack Johnson and his white British contender Billy Wells, due to anxieties over the fitness of the White race playing into imperial concerns about the consequences of a black fighter defeating a white one. This resulted in a color bar 1911-1948, where Black British boxers were allowed to fight for the British Empire title, but not for the British Championship title, even when they were born in Britain.
  80. Janet O'Shea "Beyond Winning," TedXUCLA, organized by UCLA Extension Visual Arts and UCLA Residential Life, 2017. https://danceprogram.duke.edu/file/beyond-winning-janet-oshea-tedxucla
  81. It might be worth to emphasize the importance of creating accessible and safe spaces for female boxing since boxing appears still to be a much a male-dominated sport. Female boxing was first included in the London Summer Olympics in 2012.
  82. Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford University Press, 1962, page 3.
  83. 83.0 83.1 Greg Bird, Jonathan Short, "Community, Immunity, and the Proper - an introduction to the political theory of Roberto Esposito," Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, volume 18, no 3, Sep 2013, London, Routledge, page 7.
  84. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, translated by Timothy C. Campbell, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010.
  85. Esposito, Communitas, page 13.
  86. Esposito, Communitas, page 7.
  87. I am borrowing these three terms from artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist, Bracha L. Ettinger who defines (in contrast to Lacan and Levinas) the matrixial space of the feminine uterus as “not a symbol for an invisible, unintelligible, originally, passive receptacle onto which traces are engraved by the originally and primary processes, rather, it is a concept for a transforming border space of encounter of the co-emerging I and the neither fused nor rejected unrecognized non-I. She takes “the feminine/prenatal meeting as a model for relations and processes of change and exchange in which the non-I is unknown to the I (or rather unrecognized: known by a non-cognitive process), but not an intruder. Rather the non-I is a partner-in-difference of the I. [...] It can serve as a model for a sharable dimension of subjectivity in which elements that discern one another as non-I, without knowing each other, co-emerge and coinhabit a joint space, without fusion and without rejection." Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, series "Theory Out Of Bounds" (Book 28), 2006, page 74.