Publishing Practices

Publishing Practices is a yearly program committed to an expanded idea of publishing, not confined to the production and dissemination of texts, music or art works, but opened to an active space of reflection, study, and multisensorial encounter on other ways to know and exist. Its terrains of inquiry are systems of knowledge production, reproduction, and circulation. The programs conducted within this open thread address a broad spectrum of practices, calling for awareness on often unquestioned aspects of publishing and knowledge production. Through this program we seek to foster and inquire about alternative pathways to forms of knowing.

How can one approach publishing beyond the production of prints? In which ways can publishing be activated as the ground for collective solidarity and inseparability and participate in the undoing of fixed marginalities and boundaries? What can we learn from past and current experiences? How can publishing become a mode for nurturing and consolidating an ensemble of practitioners and organizations bound by a communal will to imagine and practice inseparability between form and content, human life and the elemental world, visuality and aurality, and sensation and hapticality?

Publishing Practices is devised as a site of co-learning, that is imbued with the concept of ‘study’ proposed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and draws inspiration from collective knowledge production traversed by anti-disciplinary, and reflexive approaches bringing forward local, situated, and poetic knowledges. Publishing Practices underscores how knowledge production is always in-becoming, participatory, and contradictory and how learning as a horizontal practice can become insurgent. Furthermore, Publishing Practices seeks to critically address knowledge accessibility through the dissemination of inclusive modes of programming, display and diffusion that acknowledge and invite limitations and gateways proposed by neuro-diversity, illness, physical impairments, as well as geographical remoteness and language, among others.

The purpose of this project is threefold. Firstly, it draws together inspiring practitioners in the field of storytelling, poetry, performance, and publishing by engaging with their work, separately and jointly, in relation to a series of threads, including language, education, and gender. Secondly, it articulates how publishing is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues with both local and global resonance. Thirdly, it establishes a site for convivial research, insurgent learning, and translocality that situates the diasporic experience within and across particular localities without confining it to the territorial boundedness of the nation-state.

The program unfolds around a set of events gathering artists, writers, scholars, performers, and practitioners from the African continent and its diaspora to contribute, discuss, and co-create from within and across different regions. The primary focus of the project is nurturing and consolidating a network of practitioners and organizations united by a communal imagination of longstanding formats. The international reverberation of the programme will be ensured by the wide number of activations taking place and coming from different countries.