Publishing Practices

Sonic Meditations and Tactile Wisdom: Inside Archive Ensemble’s Haptic Library
August, 2023

In August 2023 in Berlin, the Archive Ensemble transformed a space within HKW’s O Quilombismo exhibition into something truly remarkable. Their Haptic Library installation, activated through sound by artists Leila Bencharnia and Omar Gabriel Delnevo, created a multi-sensory experience that challenged conventional notions of what a library can be.

what it feels like is good enough #1
April 14, 2022

what it feels like is good enough is a series of conversations about black and anti-colonial praxis inspired by the activities of artists and thinkers of the black radical tradition, and by Katherine McKittrick’s deep engagement with Sylvia Wynter. “I learned from [Sylvia Wynter] that sharing stories is creative rigorous radical theory,” McKittrick writes. “The act of sharing stories is the theory and the methodology.” Hosted every first Sunday of the month at the Archive Berlin space in the Wedding, this series intends to foster discussions about how we fashion our tools for liberation.

Publishing Practices #3
Weaving the Inner Bark
April 14, 2024

Weaving the Inner Bark Festival is an invitation to unpack, share, and inquire more broadly on how library projects can reflect on experiences of resistance, create ground for transnational solidarity, and participate in the unwriting and unfixing of hegemonic knowledge systems. Weaving the Inner Bark inhabits the physical space of the exhibition In the Inner Bark of Trees and activates it. The exhibition, imagined as an ensemble of potential libraries, is made of many voices and mediums. Each object in the exhibition calls for a haptical and multisensorial reading breaking away from the hegemonic fixity of the printed matter.

Unpacking our Library #5
April 27, 2023

The fifth Unpacking our Library activation departs from the practice with and against archives of artist Eli Cortiñas. Cortiñas’ lecture performance ‘I’d Blush if I Could’ questions the gender bias of contemporary digital archives and it tackles the increasing feminisation of technology through devices like voice-activated systems and other forms of artificial intelligence.

Publishing Practices #2
In the Inner Bark of Trees
January, 2023

A multivocal, translinguistic, and transnational project, In the Inner Bark of Trees, reflects the necessity of continuously challenging pathways to knowledge inheritance, production, and transmission. In presenting art libraries, texturalities, performances, and co-learning sessions that defy histories of oppression and colonialism,  the project reunites publishing practices that seek to simultaneously unsettle knowledge systems from dominant symbolic cultures and release themselves from the confines of the material medium of modern colonial libraries. Instead, it fosters the imagination not only of libraries that are no longer limited by the printing system or canonical classification but crafted and nurtured by the intergenerational techniques, modalities, and feelings needed to sustain the alternatives of insurgent practices.

Study Days
Dismantling the Disciplined Catalog, Derouting Distribution, and Cripping the Canon
February 22, 2021

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

Gathering Collectives #1:
Casa Kuà and Sickness Affinity Group
February 09, 2022

Gathering Collectives seeks to initiate and support de-accelerated conversations between entities of more than one body. To come together in community, build authentic relationships, and see what emerges from the conversations, connections, visions and needs, are the terms in which adrienne marree brown defines emergent strategy, a strategy that moves at the speed of trust. This inquiry does not confine itself to one format. Gathering Collectives in itself is rather a strategy than a program that fosters relationship building over project results and occasionally offers moments for sharing experiences with a wider public.

Study Days
With and Against Archives
January 15, 2022

These Study days are a part of Publishing Practices, a yearly program committed to an expanded idea of publishing, which intends to open a collective publishing space for action, reflection, study, intervention and multi-sensorial encounter.

Exhibition and Study Days, at Archive, in Berlin, Germany
December 04, 2021

The exhibition will explore both artistic and publishing practices that are concerned with the spatiality of the book as a medium and the mobility embedded in it. The Study Days are conceived as a two days long public program of gatherings, talks and performances.

Unpacking our Library #4
November 26, 2021

The fourth Unpacking our Library activation invites Algerian writer and feminist Wassyla Tamzali to experiment and explore strategies of collective readings and library activations in conversation with the Intilak research team composed by artist Touda Bouanani, curator Lea Morin and publisher Maya Ouabadi.

Practices of rupture. Toward a reparative justice
November 21, 2021

Practices of rupture, metaphors of destruction, even acts of symbolic vandalism, have come to be associated with radical artistic practices banging at the doors of museums for their demands for a reparative justice to be given credence. A painting titled Trauma 2 by Jermay Michael Gabriel on display in Milan, is a double-representation of trauma. During an action by Khadim Loume and Jermay Michael Gabriel, the painting of a lady’s face is razor-cut at the neck and the supporting frame has been bared. It may seem that in order to begin to repair, the continuum of hegemonic epistemologies (with which museums have carried on working with historic collections) first need to be torn apart, their structures revealed.

Unpacking our Library #3
November 20, 2021

Taking as a starting point the pages of crucial feminist periodicals from Turkey, Sosyalist Feminist Kaktüs/Socialist Feminist Cactus (1988-90) and Feminist Politika/ Feminist Politics (2009-today), Özlem Kaya, sociologist, feminist activist and human rights archivist, and Onur Çimen, writer and researcher, will experiment and explore strategies of collective readings and library activations. While reading and translating the archival materials, they will make connections between different generations of feminist positions and present today’s challenges and cultural practices.

Forum of co-learning, at Archive in Berlin, Germany
November 14, 2021

The forum will convene residents for a four-weeks-long reunion and intensive program. One open session on the discussed contents will take every Saturday. Sessions with Sepake Angiama, Soukaina Aboulaoula, Untitled Duo, Imann Gaye, Anawana Haloba, Emanuela Maltese, Léa Morin, Marie-Yemta Moussanang, Nontikelelo Mutiti, Maya Ouabadi, Cindy Sissoko, Ariam Tekle, Giovanna Esposito Yussif, and more.

Unpacking our Library #2
October 20, 2021

Ausgehend von den Praktiken der Community Bibliothek Each One Teach One (EOTO) e.V. in Berlin-Wedding und der legendären Afro-deutschen Magazins Afro-Look (1987-1999) werden Michael Götting, Autor, Bibliothekar und Kurator, und Ricky Reiser, Aktivistin, Redakteurin und autodidaktische Künstlerin, mit Strategien des kollektiven Lesens und Bibliotheksaktivierungen experimentieren. Beim Aufschlagen der Seiten von Afro-Look, dem Archiv der Aktivistin Vera Heyer, u.a. Archivematerial, werden sie Verbindungen zwischen Ansätzen früherer Generationen, und den heutigen Stimmen, Positionen und Kontexten herstellen.