4 Summary of projects and submitted material
Contents
- 1 Intro
- 2 Projects
- 2.1 AND Publishing – with Rosalie Schweiker and multiple collaborators (2009 – ongoing)
- 2.2 Library of Inclusions and Omissions (2016–ongoing)
- 2.3 The Piracy Project – with Andrea Francke and multiple collaborators (2010–2015)
- 2.4 Let's Mobilise: What is Feminist Pedagogy? three-day mobilisation and workbook – with feminist pedagogy working group, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg (2015–2016)
- 2.5 Boxing and Unboxing, Research Residency, MarabouParken Konsthall, Stockholm – with Rosalie Schweiker (April – August 2018)
- 3 Published (Fixed)
- 3.1 Against Immunisation: Boxing as a Technique for Commoning (exhibition, score) Panke Gallery, Berlin, 21 September – 12 October 2019
- 3.2 Micropolitics of Publishing (video interview), 15 September 2018
- 3.3 Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices – How copyright destroys collective practice (book chapter)
- 3.4 More Verb, Less Noun - Publishing as Collective Practice (printed interview)
- 3.5 One publishes to find comrades (book chapter)
- 3.6 UND statt ODER – die Anatomie von UND (interview)
- 3.7 Radical publishing practices ask for radical librarianship] (twitter thread)
- 3.8 Dear Hannah (pamphlet)
- 3.9 Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community (book chapter)
- 3.10 Library Underground – welcome to my tent (performative reading/video)
- 3.11 Socialising Archives: The Piracy Project (book chapter)
- 3.12 The Impermanent Book, co-authored with Andrea Francke (essay)
- 3.13 Outside the Page (chapter)
- 3.14 Let's Mobilise: Revisited (working title) (chapter)
- 3.15 Help! David Cameron Likes my Art (book chapter)
- 4 Discursive – teaching, workshops, presentations, discussions, think-ins (Unfixed)
- 4.1 Moments of Autonomy. Feminist educational practices for the digital commons (think-in) at Open Scores - How to program the Commons, convened by Creating Commons, Panke Gallery, Berlin, 12 October 2019
- 4.2 Situated Collective Authorship (propositive input)at Authors of The Future: Re-imagining Copyleft Studyday, Constant, Brussels hosted by ISELP (Institut Supérieur pour l’Étude du Langage Plastique) Brussels, 27 September 2019
- 4.3 Library Talks, Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, 24 September 2019
- 4.4 Interfacing the Law (workshop) Constant (Brussels) & XPUB, Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam), Infrastructural Manœuvres, Rietveld Library (Amsterdam) 9-10 May 2019
- 4.5 Experimental Publishing #1, Critique, Intervention, Speculation (symposium) Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Postoffice, Coventry University, 11 April 2019
- 4.6 Creating Commons, Tools and Infrastructures (research meeting) HeK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel 13.-16. September 2018
- 4.7 Writer X (workshop with Eleanor Vonne Brown) X Publishing School, Whitechapel Art Gallery London, 8 Sept 2018
- 4.8 Feminist Arts Education, Institute for Art and Art Theory, Intermedia / Artistic Media Practice and Theory, Cologne University, 2017 (talk and workshop with Rose Borthwick)
- 4.9 Reading Gendered Words, at Library Interventions (workshop with Rosalie Schweiker)Leeds College of Art, April 2017
- 4.10 Library Underground at Miss Read (performative reading) Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2016
- 4.11 Exploiting Justice, Symposium, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Gothenburg, 2016 (presentation)
- 4.12 What is an Artschool, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2016 (presentation)
- 5 Notes (Summary of Projects and submitted material)
Intro
The just described activities and theorisations in the wider field of publishing and the formation of knowledge serve as a backdrop for a string of related practical experiments I carried out during my own artistic career between 1998 and 2018. They are practice examples where acts of publication, distribution and consumption have been rethought in order to firstly articulate enclosures, exclusions and oppressions originated by dominant power structures and secondly to experiment with and develop different models, that facilitate an emancipatory, intersectional, de-colonial feminist knowledge formation. As such they can be described as counter-political projects that are held against dominant approaches to the topic.
One characteristic of these experiments is that most of them are collaborations. They developed responses to specific problems, which I identified with other artists in order to create an alternative. These greatly differing instances cannot be understood within a conventional publishing framework, rather they fall into the expanded category and loosened definition of “creating a public”.
A pivotal common aim and approach of these experiments is that they don't intend to make works 'about politics'. Instead they aim at finding operational models to work counter-politically – through the actual practice itself. Hence my artistic concern is not to illustrate a political position, but to actively engage in political experiments in publishing yielding impact and results.
The experiments discussed below fall in a wide range of contexts. What they have in common though is that they can all be seen in relation to institutions – with some just being commissioned by institutions, others being located within institutions, with and without official mandate, and yet a third group deliberately instituted outside institutions in order to create a transversal collective space often inoperable within mainstream institutions.
Lastly, most of these experiments are projected long-term. They develop over time in order to test out various agile approaches. If one approach is not working it is adapted and applied again from a different angle. That is the reason, why the following list is so comprehensive.
Projects
AND Publishing – with Rosalie Schweiker and multiple collaborators
(2009 – ongoing)
AND is a collaborative publishing activity, based in London. Initiated in 2009, it seeks to develop infrastructures of publishing starting from three questions: Why publish, how and for whom? Observing that the existing institutional infrastructures keep replicating the exclusionary mechanisms and hierarchies dominating the university, AND started, without mandate [1], at Byam Shaw School of Art in London as an indy-university press, publishing works of students, staff and alumni in an equitable and non-hierarchical manner.[2] Next to exploring the immediacy and social possibilities of print on demand and new modes of distribution, AND also explores the social agency of cultural piracy. AND is also invested in feminist radical pedagogy, builds informal support structures by sharing a studio, providing resources and advice, as well as access to skills, means of production and distribution. AND re-distributes budgets, commissions work, and (re-)publishes material which is difficult to find. The members of AND are part of a diverse network of critical, feminist, de-colonial publishing activities and campaigns.[3]
→AND Publishing
Library of Inclusions and Omissions
(2016–ongoing)
The Library of Inclusions and Omissions (LIO) is a practice-based experiment into critical knowledge infrastructures. Through an open call for contribution, it sets up a reference library that is curated by the community using it. So far roughly 100 contributions are on the shelf. The collection is available to the public via temporary reading rooms. The library gathers feminist, intersectional, postcolonial materials which are not, or only sparsely available in institutional collections or databases, too flimsy in format or otherwise not validated by publishing houses or institutions such as libraries. Can such a curatorial concept help to give voice to undiscovered, suppressed or otherwise not acknowledged material? Can this turn a library from a repository of knowledge into a space of social and intellectual encounter?
→Library of Inclusions and Omissions
The Piracy Project – with Andrea Francke and multiple collaborators
(2010–2015)
The Piracy Project started in collaboration with artist Andrea Francke as a reaction on the imminent closure of Byam Shaw School of Art library in London. Through an open call for pirated books to populate the self-governed art school library and through researching pirate book markets in Peru, China and Turkey, The Piracy Project gathered a collection of around 150 copied, emulated, appropriated and modified books from across the world. Their copying approaches vary widely, from playful strategies of reproduction, modification and reinterpretation of existing works to circumventing enclosures such as censorship or market monopolies, to acts of piracy generated by commercial interests. This collection of books serves as the starting point to explore the common understanding of authorship, originality and the implications policy and legal developments have had on intellectual property and copyright. Through temporary reading rooms, workshops, lectures, discussions and debates The Piracy Project explores the philosophical, legal and social implications of cultural piracy and creative modes of dissemination.
→The Piracy Project
Let's Mobilise: What is Feminist Pedagogy? three-day mobilisation and workbook – with feminist pedagogy working group, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg
(2015–2016)
'Let's Mobilise: What is Feminist Pedagogy?' is a long-term collective investigation into intersectional, feminist and de-colonial pedagogies, that led to the collective organising of a three-day international mobilisation in October 2016. The feminist pedagogies working group was made up of students, staff and administrators (Kanchan Burathoki, Rose Borthwick, MC Coble, Andreas Engman, Gabo Camnitzer, Eva Weinmayr). Its aim was twofold: Firstly to provide a space to discuss the highs and lows in our own learning and teaching. To study and review university policies and institutional habits, to read together relevant texts and set up an online shadow library on feminist intersectional de-colonial pedagogies. This happened in bi-weekly lunchtime meetings that were open to the whole academy.
Secondly, we worked towards organising an international conference (mobilisation) that fundamentally rethinks how knowledge is produced, transmitted and disseminated in order to find strategies to adjust the Euro-centric canon and its exclusions, institutional habits and procedures, and create an understanding of equality that is not blind to difference. The mobilisation itself was a practice experiment by experimenting with non-normative use of the classroom, time, and language, and paying attention to the empirical body. →Let's Mobilise: What is Feminist Pedagogy?
Boxing and Unboxing, Research Residency, MarabouParken Konsthall, Stockholm – with Rosalie Schweiker
(April – August 2018)
During the five-months research residency at MarabouParken in Stockholm AND Publishing organised together with curator Jenny Richards boxing training for self-defining women, installed an "Unboxing Room" with the boxes of materials they brought from their UK based practice and held three public talks.
MarabouParken Konsthall's evolving strand of research residencies aims to collaborate with artists groups and collectives in order to support their practice by developing "new lines of inquiry over a three month period and share these with others through workshop and events.[4] The overarching strand called "Acts of Self-ruin" was based on Leela Gandhi's book "The Common Cause" inviting collectives to explore the struggle for collectivity and equality in an age of individualism.[5] →Boxing and Unboxing
Published (Fixed)
Against Immunisation: Boxing as a Technique for Commoning (exhibition, score)
|
Micropolitics of Publishing (video interview), 15 September 2018Cornelia Sollfranck in conversation with Eva Weinmayr. Interview in the context of the research project Creating Commons at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts, conducted in cooperation with HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) by Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank and Shusha Niederberger (2017 – 2020). |
Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices – How copyright destroys collective practice (book chapter)This chapter investigates the coercive relationship between authorship and copyright from the perspective of intersectional feminist and de-colonial knowledge practices. Examining three artistic strategies (Richard Prince, Cady Noland and the Piracy Project) which all try to challenge the close ties between copyright and authorship – although with very different outcomes – I will show how the concept of authorship that is grounded in possessive individualism creates considerable blockages for critical art, education and collective practice. Trying to politicise individual authorship and to escape its construction through legal, economic and institutional frameworks, I discuss how this chapter would circulate in current systems of dissemination, validation and authorisation if I did not assign my name to it - if it went un-authored so to speak. From a de-colonial feminist perspective, however, authorship, after all, marks the positionality of the speaking subject in order to account for the often unacknowledged eurocentrism of western philosophy (Gayatry Spivak). Acknowledging this double bind, I wonder, how we might eventually be able to invent modes of being and working together that recognise the difference of the ’who’ that writes, and at the same time might be able to move on from the question ‘how can we get rid of the author’ to inventing processes of subjectivation that we want to support and instigate. 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 |
More Verb, Less Noun - Publishing as Collective Practice (printed interview)in conversation with Jinglun Zhu in "The Netletter", Centre for Curatorial Studies CCS Bard, Anandale/N.Y, 2019 |
One publishes to find comrades (book chapter)The text investigates how collective techniques of publishing can initiate a social process where printed publications, posters or zines are not necessarily an end product trying to convince someone of something, but rather a method for 'working towards establishing conditions for the co-production of meaning’.[6]in Publishing Manifestos, edited by Michalis Pichler, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2018. Originally published in The Visual Event, an education in appearances, edited by Oliver Klimpel, Leipzig, Spector Books, 2014 |
UND statt ODER – die Anatomie von UND (interview)Annette Gilbert in conversation with Rosalie Schweiker and Eva Weinmayr (AND Publishing, London) about AND's collective feminist publishing practice that understands publication as a verb (a social process) rather than a noun (the finished object). Annette, Rosalie and Eva discuss the multiple roles AND publishing takes on (artist, researcher, educator, curator, collector, librarian, host, organiser and activist) and reflect on the dilemmas, contradictions and joy such a contextual, contingent, informal, supportive and precarious practice involves. The interview is published in an anthology about contemporary artists' publishing. in Publish! Publizieren als künstlerische Praxis, Kunstforum International, issue 256, September 2018 (German language). |
Radical publishing practices ask for radical librarianship] (twitter thread)This presentation in the panel “Publishing to Mobilize Knowledge” asks about the relationship between practices of production, circulation and consumption of radical, critical, artistic publishing. What are the institutional infrastructures and routines (libraries, archives, bookstores etc) of naming and framing, of selecting and cataloguing, and how do these routines institutionalise, privilege or exclude knowledges that don’t fit into the established categories. The presentation itself takes an experimental approach to citational practice: Using Twitter to publish the links to references, sources and images as a twitter thread online I am publishing my slides as well as my bibliography live for the audience to revisit and build upon.
At Artists as Publishers as Artists, KHM University of Media Arts, Cologne, 6 July 2018. Panel: "Publishing to Mobilize Knowledge" with Clara Balaguer, Yvette Mutumba, Eva Weinmayr. Organised by Agustina Andreoletti, Lilian Haberer, Karin Lingnau, Konstantin Butz. |
Dear Hannah (pamphlet)This short text, written in epistolary form, reflects on issues of co-option of collective and community based work by artistic ambition and the limits of what is exhibitable in the context of an international art biennale. The text has been circulated as email letter and printed pamphlet. Published on the occasion of The Utopia of Access, exhibition, Pavilion of Artistic Research, 57th Venice Biennale 2017 |
Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community (book chapter)This chapter, written in the form of a dialogue, presents an informal conversation between Eva Weinmayr and her inner voice about artistic and critical practices of radical librarianship and underground dissemination. It touches on a set of examples from informal distribution strategies of the Whole Earth catalogue, to the radical librarian movement in California in the 70s (Celeste West, Sanford Berman) as well as a range of contemporary activist librarian practices (aaaaarg.org, memory of the world and the Piracy Project). Common concerns about the function and value of public libraries and access to knowledge “for every member of the community” (ALA, Library Bill of Rights 1939) seem to crop up throughout the conversation: Who is a library for?; What kind of materials and topics are missing and the implicit biases in the organisation and classification of knowledge? |
Library Underground – welcome to my tent (performative reading/video)The text has been performed from inside a trekking tent installed at Valand's main lecture hall with a video camera transmitting what happens inside the tent onto the lecture hall screen. With Eva Weinmayr as Eva Weinmayr and Rose Borthwick as Inner Voice. Filmed and edited by Camilla Topuntoli. Video 32 min. at symposium Photography in Print and Circulation, convened by Louise Wolthers, Niclas Östlind, Hasselblad Foundation/Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, 2016 |
Socialising Archives: The Piracy Project (book chapter)The chapter is a revised manuscript of my presentation in the seminar "Socialising Archives" hold during the symposium "Archives of the Commons II" at Reina Sofia in Madrid, which was chaired by Mabel Tapia. I took this invitation and its distinct question to share experiences and methods, the operational strategies to turn the archive into a space of social and intellectual encounter as opportunity to reflect the curatorial and operational strategies we employed while working on The Piracy Project. in Archives of the Commons II - the Anomic Archive, edited by Red Conceptualismos del Sur, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia Madrid, forthcoming |
The Impermanent Book, co-authored with Andrea Francke (essay)The text looks at the desire of dealing with a stable book, an permanent object, which is resolved and fixed in print. It argues, that it is the technical advances of the analogue printing press combined with mass production that constructs the contemporary idea of books as fixed objects. A concept where immutability is a key factor that allows for mass and consistent reproduction. What are the consequences for the book as the authoritative object, to which one can always come back to, when digital technology facilitates mass production and mutability at the same time? Digital print and print-on demand have become widespread and allow for continuous changes, adaptions and revisions. The text discusses the assumed unease and fundamental challenge this kind of versioning exerts on the reader. What happens when books become unreliable objects, when one copy of the book potentially tells a different story than the other? in Rhizome.org, 2012 and in Best of Rhizome 2012, edited by Joanne McNeil, Brescia: LINK Editions, 2013 |
Outside the Page (chapter)This chapter discusses how the format of the publication determine its dissemination and related the modes of reading. The text contrasts Marcel Broodthaers' two-piece work 'Voyage on the North Sea' (1974) with the distribution of poster-size pages of 'Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy Workbook' across the building of Valand Academy. [more and better description needed...] in The Filmic Page, "On Curating" ZHdK Zürich, forthcoming issue |
Let's Mobilise: Revisited (working title) (chapter)in Decolonialism after the educational turn, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, forthcoming |
Help! David Cameron Likes my Art (book chapter)The text narrates the events and agonies brought about by the UK Government Art Collection’s acquisition of my art work Today’s Question and its subsequent loan to Samantha and David Cameron for their private residence at Downing Street, then Prime Minister of the UK. in Distributed, edited by David Blamey and Brad Haylock, London: Open Editions, 2018 |
Discursive – teaching, workshops, presentations, discussions, think-ins (Unfixed)
Moments of Autonomy. Feminist educational practices for the digital commons (think-in)
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Situated Collective Authorship (propositive input)
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Library Talks, Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, 24 September 2019The invitation: "During each Library Talk, a speaker introduces a list of a maximum of ten books to the audience that have been important to their practice, and that will be acquired for the occasion by our library. The only rule within the selection is that none of the books can be authored by the speakers themselves. We hope that the speaker can introduce how their practice has been constructed and which different voices it consists of. The selection of books also introduces different ways of reading our library collection: through the catalogue system and a custom made library card the library users can trace back these personal selections within the library." |
Interfacing the Law (workshop)
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Experimental Publishing #1, Critique, Intervention, Speculation (symposium)
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Creating Commons, Tools and Infrastructures (research meeting)
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Writer X (workshop with Eleanor Vonne Brown)
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Feminist Arts Education, Institute for Art and Art Theory, Intermedia / Artistic Media Practice and Theory, Cologne University, 2017 (talk and workshop with Rose Borthwick)Three decades ago, political scientist Carolyn M. Shrewsbury in her text „What is Feminist Pedagogy?“ argued: „Feminist pedagogy begins with a vision what education might be like but frequently is not.“ In the 1990s, bell hooks claimed: „Feminist Thinking in the Classroom Right Now“! So, what is the current state of feminist affairs in institutional teaching and learning environments? What characterises the relation between student and teacher, academic discourse and the spaces of its implementation, subjective experiences and social dynamics, artistic methods and their historic references? Rose and I addressed these questions reflecting on our experience of co-organising Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg in 2016, followed by an practical workshop. Instant posters were collectively developed and distributed at selected locations across the corridors, staircases, walls and doors of the University building. |
Reading Gendered Words, at Library Interventions (workshop with Rosalie Schweiker)
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Library Underground at Miss Read (performative reading)
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Exploiting Justice, Symposium, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Gothenburg, 2016 (presentation) |
What is an Artschool, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2016 (presentation) |
to be continued...
Notes (Summary of Projects and submitted material)
- ↑ Support included colleagues's offer to share office and equipment, including publishing classes in their courses inviting AND to develop publishing projects with students, facilitating work-based learning internships with AND. The management quickly realised the critical and socially generative potential of our activity and provided small funds and semi-official support
- ↑ AND was co-founded by Lynn Harris and Eva Weinmayr. Andrea Francke worked temporarily with AND. Today it is run by Rosalie Schweiker and Eva Weinmayr.
- ↑ OOMK, X Marks the Bökship, Keep it Complex in London
- ↑ Invitation email from curator Jenny Richards, 7 August 2017
- ↑ MarabouParken website
- ↑ Stevphen Shukaitis, 'Toward an Insurrection of the Published? Ten Thoughts on Ticks & Comrades', eicp transversal, June 2014 [1]