Urgentcraft: Radical Publishing During Crisis (2021)

This piece was commissioned by post documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies, a collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany and the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece. Here, I adapted my previous Urgentcraft writings into a longer work, structured as a “narrative syllabus in 19 parts.” It was also delivered as a talk on February 9, 2021.

“Publishing is political. Publishing can compel, persuade, inform, attract, confuse, script, or manipulate. Urgent acts of “making public” can mobilize communities and inspire change. In crisis, we see independent artists, community organizers, scholars, and activists collectively engaging with sophisticated modes of publishing to record and communicate in real time, while those in traditional positions of power use those same tools to engineer and control our defining narratives. It’s here that we can locate the enormous paradox of contemporary publishing: its potential to oppress as well as to empower.

From Facebook posts to presidential tweets, from dance-based memes to print-on-demand journals to mutual aid zines, stories are constructed and experiences shared across networks. How and why they reach us and why we’re compelled to trust them—or not—is crucial to any understanding of how publishing operates right now.

Publics consume and amplify, and sometimes resist and refuse, those defining narratives.

This syllabus focuses in particular on those queer strategies of resistance, refusal, and survival. As an overarching idea, urgentcraft explores the potential for radical publishing to gather and mobilize people around urgent artifacts and messages. As a syllabus, urgentcraft presents a range of artists, projects, texts, and concepts that foreground those strategies in recent history, as well as in contemporary independent publishing. As an expanding set of principles, urgentcraft identifies anti-racist ways of working in crisis, using art and design to fuel emancipatory projects and the movement towards liberation.”

Continue reading “Urgentcraft: Radical Publishing During Crisis” →