4 Summary of projects and submitted material

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Contents

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 Publishing webpage

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)

Library of Omissions and Inclusions

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)

Street vendor, Lima Peru, 2010 Photo: Andrea Franke

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 Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?, Valand Academy 14-16 Oct 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)

Unboxing, AND Research Residency, MarabouParken Konsthall, Stockholm 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)
Panke Gallery, Berlin, 21 September – 12 October 2019

Eva Weinmayr Open Scores Poster.jpg

With this score "Against Immunisation: Boxing as a Technique for Commoning" I propose to rethink the concept of the commons in a counterintuitive fashion. If we conceived of 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, then it might serve as a technique to unlearn the building blocks of possessive individualism and the figure of the “proper.” Boxing is a moment of “border swerving, border linking and border-spacing” (Ettinger), rendering permeable the borderlines of our “proper” subjects. As a nonverbal, bodily dialogue it transgresses the very borderlines 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.

In the exhibition Open Scores - How to program the Commons, curated by Creating Commons (Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder)
With Dušan Barok (monoskop.org), Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (memoryoftheworld.org), Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber (0xdb.org), Sean Dockray (aaaaarg.fail), Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett (furtherfield.org), Constant (Michael Murtaugh, Femke Snelting & Peter Westenberg), Laurence Rassel (erg.be), Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar’s Lab), Panayotis Antoniadis (nethood.org), Mario Purakthofer (www.dock18.ch), Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it), Eva Weinmayr (andpublishing.org), Kenneth Goldsmith (ubu.com), Zeljko Blace (#QUEERingNETWORKing), Sakrowski (curatingyoutube.net), Spideralex, Tactical Tech, Creating Commons, Alison Knowles.

Pages from Boxing and Unboxing Calendar, AND Publishing, 2018


Micropolitics of Publishing (video interview), 15 September 2018

Eva Weinmayr Cornelia Sollfranck Creating Commons interview.jpg

Cornelia 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).
🔊 Watch interview


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

Download pdfPdf.jpg

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)

Eva Weinmayr–One publishes to find comrades.jpg
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
Download pdfPdf.jpg


UND statt ODER – die Anatomie von UND (interview)

Kunstforum interview 2018.jpg

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).
Download textPdf.jpg


Radical publishing practices ask for radical librarianship] (twitter thread)

Eva Weinmayr Twitter Thread-KHM Cologne3.png

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.
See Twitter thread


Dear Hannah (pamphlet)

LIO-Eva Weinmayr pamphlet 'Dear Hanna' Venice Biennale.jpg

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
Download pdf]Pdf.jpg


Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community (book chapter)

Eva Weinmayr Library Underground Sternberg Press.png

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?


In Publishing as Artistic Practice, edited by Annette Gilbert, Berlin/New York: Sternberg, 2016
Download textPdf.jpg


Library Underground – welcome to my tent (performative reading/video)

Library Underground-welcome to my tent-film still.jpg

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
🔊 Watch video


We don't want this to become an exhibit (book chapter)

The chapter is a revised manuscript of my presentation in the seminar "Socialising Archives" held 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 an 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
Download pdf Pdf.jpg


The Impermanent Book, co-authored with Andrea Francke (essay)

The text looks at the desire of dealing with a stable book, a 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
Read essay on Rhizome.org


Outside the Page, Making Social Realities With Books (chapter)

This chapter discusses how the format of the publication determines 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
Outside the Page Pdf.jpg


Let's Mobilise: Revisited (working title) (chapter)

Chapter Lets Mobilize Revisited-Valand Academy Femped working group.jpg
The working group took the invitation to contribute a chapter to this book as an opportunity to revisit the collectively authored "glossary" in the 'Let's Mobilize workbook' in which we explained the reasons and the aims for the mobilisation. This act of revisiting the original text allowed us to reflect with hindsight on our working together. By using the method of layered commenting, we preserved each authors voice instead of streamlining the writing into observations and statements each member could agree with. Here the collective writing of a text becomes a place for dialogue and disagreements. It builds on experiments of non linear writing done by Arno Schmidt ('Zettel's Dream', 1970) and Pierre Bayle ('Historical and Critical Dictionary', 1737).

in Decolonialism after the educational turn, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, forthcoming
Let's Mobilise Revisited Pdf.jpg


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
Download pdf Pdf.jpg




Discursive – teaching, workshops, presentations, discussions, think-ins (Unfixed)

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

What concepts of knowledge inform our techno-feminist thinking and practice? How much do we have to know in order to be able to take an emancipated position? What is the role of affect in our daily handling of technology? To what extent can the principles of open-source culture be an inspiration for educational projects? What do we need in order to build communality in and for the techno-feminist struggle? (local/global)? What are methods to transform what has been learned into a collective agency and empowering strategies for desired change?

We will spend one day together in Berlin to exchange experiences, compare methodologies, develop strategies, inspire each other, and think about taking the next steps together… maybe in the form of a manifesto, a curriculum, a book, a conference, a research project… We will see what is most suitable and also feasible. Participants: Andrea Hubin (Kunsthalle Wien), Shusha Niederberger (Haus für Elektronische Künste, Basel), Peggy Pierrot (erg, Brussels), Daphne Dragona (Transmediale, Berlin), Safa Ghnaim (tactical tech, Berlin), Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory, Vienna), Magda Tyzlik-Carver, Janine Sack, Marie Dietze, Eva Weinmayr (AND, Let's Mobilize, Teaching to Transgress Toolbox, London/ Göteborg).


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

Conventional intellectual property law binds authors and their hybrid contemporary practices in a framework of assumed ownership and individualism. It conceives creations as original works, making collective, networked practices difficult to fit. Within that legal and ideological framework, Copyleft, Open Content Licenses or Free Culture Licensing introduced a different view of authorship, opening up the possibility for a re-imagining of authorship as a collective, feminist, webbed practice. But over time, some of the initial spark and potentiality of Free Culture licensing has been normalised and its problems and omissions have become increasingly apparent. This study day is therefore meant to see if we can start re-imagining copyleft together.

Can we invent licences that are based on collective creative practices, in which cooperation between the machine and biological authors, need not be an exception? How could attribution be a form of situated genealogy, rather than accounting for heritage through listing names of contributing individuals? In what way can we limit predatory practices without blocking the generative potential of Free Culture? What would a decolonial and feminist license look like, and in what way could we propose entangled notions of authorship? Or perhaps we should think of very different strategies?


Severine Dusollier (SciencesPo, Paris): Inclusive Copyright 🔈
Aymeric Mansoux (XPUB, Rotterdam): Free Only-if 🔈
Eva Weinmayr (Piracy Project/And Publishing, London): Situated collective authorship 🔊
Daniel Blanga Gubbay (KFDA, Brussels): Potential authorship 🔊

Participants, Materials, Recordings, [2], Images of the day

Library Talks, Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, 24 September 2019

The 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)
Constant (Brussels) & XPUB, Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam), Infrastructural Manœuvres, Rietveld Library (Amsterdam) 9-10 May 2019

Pirate libraries, shadow libraries, piratical text collections, amateur digital libraries, peer-produced libraries and how to read them together. The study days are based on Femke Snelting's letter to the participants in which she explains her discomfort of having signed the Custodians Online ‘In solidarity with Library Genesis and SciHub’ letter back in 2015. She writes:

"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. If we want to find ways to make the public debate on shadow libraries transcend the juridical binary of illegal versus legal, and claim political legitimacy for acting out their potential, we need to experiment with how these libraries are a form of publishing, how they rethink the social contracts that link libraries, librarians, readers and books. And that is what we’ll try to do in Interfacing the law.
Extra-legal publishing, bibliothèques sauvage, piratical text collections, popular resource sharing methods, peer-acy, amateur digital libraries, bibliogifting, uneasy sharing, peer-produced libraries … the growing collection of euphemisms for pirate libraries points at the vibrancy of these practices that are literally unbound from institutional, legal and even conventional material constraints.
Always paradoxical or even incoherent, they interface each in their own way with legal and political frameworks. How can these practices get us closer to the kind of libraries we require?"


9 May 2019
Visit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam to learn from Martino Morandi & Anita Burato about the project "Infrastructural Manœuvres in the Library". Participants: XPUB1 students (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), Ann Mertens (Constant Brussels), Martino Morandi & Anita Burati (Infrastructural Manœuvres, Rietveld Library), Lieven Lahaye (Rietveld Library), Eva Weinmayr (The Piracy Project/AND Publishing London). See collective notes

10 May 2019
Workshop on "Pirate libraries, shadow libraries, piratical text collections, amateur digital libraries, peer-produced libraries and how to read them together." Participants: Femke Snelting (Constant, Brussels), XPUB1 students (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), Eva Weinmayr (The Piracy Project/AND Publishing London). See collective notes


Experimental Publishing #1, Critique, Intervention, Speculation (symposium)
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Postoffice, Coventry University, 11 April 2019

Panel with Rebekka Kiesewetter, convened by Janneke Adema and Kaja Marczewska.

Experimental publishing can be positioned as an intervention, a mode of critique, and a tool of speculation. It is a way of thinking about writing and publishing today that has at its centre a commitment to questioning and breaking down distinctions between practice and theory, criticality and creativity, and between the scholarly and the artistic. This series explores contemporary approaches to experimental publishing as:

  • an ongoing critique of our current publishing systems and practices, deconstructing existing hegemonies and questioning the fixtures in publishing to which we have grown accustomed—from the book as a stable object to single authorship and copyright.
  • an affirmative practice which offers means to re-perform our existing writerly, research, and publishing institutions and practices through publishing experiments.
  • a speculative practice that makes possible an exploration of different futures for writing and research, and the emergence of new, potentially more inclusive forms, genres, and spaces of publishing, open to ambivalence and failure.

This take on experimentation can be understood as a heterogeneous, unpredictable, and uncontained process, one that leaves the critical potentiality of the book as a medium open to new intellectual, political, and economic contingencies.


Creating Commons, Tools and Infrastructures (research meeting)
HeK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel 13.-16. September 2018

The research project Creating Commons explores interstitial practices which open the space between art and commons. Practices that challenge established notions of contemporary aesthetic practice as well as of contemporary commons. The research aims to develop a new theoretical and aesthetic framework for this emerging field. Commons constitute constantly evolving realities pointing beyond the growing commercialisation of culture and its damaging effects.

For this research meeting a group of artists, activists, designers, theorists and researchers gathered to discuss the dynamics and role of infrastructures and tools. The framing questions for the research are: (i) how can new forms of organisation and collaboration bring forth different kinds of cultural works and social relations? (ii) how are new property relations articulated? (iii) how can artistic practices contribute to the further development of the commons as inclusive, diverse and democratic forms of organisation? (iv) what role can art and an expanded understanding of aesthetics play in the advancement of the commons as a political project?

The research project is located at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts, conducted in cooperation with HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) and conducted by Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank and Shusha Niederberger (2017 – 2020).


Writer X (workshop with Eleanor Vonne Brown)
X Publishing School, Whitechapel Art Gallery London, 8 Sept 2018

A collaborative writing experiment with Eva Weinmayr and Eleanor Vonne Brown using an online text editor to write a live script from the London Art Book Fair creating imaginative fictional co-authored and situated narration. Prompt: “A well known public figure is circumnavigating the London Art Book Fair disguised as a librarian, a dementor or a stray dog. Writers are situated throughout the fair and its threshold, observing and collectively creating and reworking a rolling commentary with each other on possible sightings.”

For the London Art Book Fair 2018, founder of bookshop and art space X Marks the Bökship Eleanor Vonne Brown has collaborated with the Gallery to curate a series of events reimagining Whitechapel Gallery as the X Publishing School. Divided across five spaces, a lecture hall, a common room, assembly hall, library and a playground, the School takes Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Koenig, 1970, (Reprinted, Occasional Papers, 2014) as its curriculum. Filliou writes: ‘The purpose of this study is to show how some of the problems inherent to teaching and learning can be solved – or at least eased – through an application of the participation techniques developed by artists in such fields as: happenings, events, action poetry, environments, visual poetry, films, street performances, non-instrumental music, games, correspondences, etc.’ Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts can be described as a study on experimental pedagogy based on the principles of Fluxus and kindred, participatory art movements of Filliou’s era. For example the publication’s design enacts the principles it discusses: the text is punctuated with blank spaces left for the reader to fill—an invitation to collaborate and co-author the book. Filliou’s invitation to the reader to become the writer was the starting point of this collaborative writing workshop. Eight participants distributed over different spaces at the Whitechapel Art Gallery during the London Art Book Fair shared one and the same online writing pad. This experiment in collaborative writing resulted in a story, which formed in real-time by reading and reacting to, adding to, changing or refining the unfolding narrative. watch how the writing unfolds


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)
Leeds College of Art, April 2017

The workshop was convened by Rosa Nussbaum and included a conversation between Maria Fusco and Wendy Kirk (Glasgow Women Library) around cataloguing practices at the Glasgow Women Library. Its aim was to develop unorthodox approaches to cataloguing selected titles from the Library of Omissions and Inclusions in order to experiment with alternatives to the normative “controlled vocabulary” used in the standardised library classification systems.


Library Underground at Miss Read (performative reading)
Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2016

Miss Read Artist Book Festival and conference, organised by Michalis Pichler, Yaiza Camps, Moritz Grünke. The panel 'Publishing as Artistic Practice' was convened by Annette Gilbert. The performative reading of a revised and updated script of the original text 'Library Underground' was performed by Eva Weinmayr as Eva Weinmayr and Eleanor Vonne Brown as Inner Voice.


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)

  1. 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
  2. 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.
  3. OOMK, X Marks the Bökship, Keep it Complex in London
  4. Invitation email from curator Jenny Richards, 7 August 2017
  5. MarabouParken website
  6. Stevphen Shukaitis, 'Toward an Insurrection of the Published? Ten Thoughts on Ticks & Comrades', eicp transversal, June 2014 [1]