Survival by Sharing (2023)
Survival by Sharing (scenes and provocations) is a 16-page newsprint zine containing the text of a talk delivered on June 17, 2023 at the Korean Society of Typography conference “Publishing as a Worldview,” at Platform-P, Seoul, Republic of Korea. 100 copies of the zine were printed at Binch / Queer.Archive.Work in Providence, RI and an edition of 50 was hand-carried to Seoul to distribute to the audience at the talk. The text describes a publishing ethos, told in a series of scenes, non-chronologically. It’s a cinematic timeline, told in queer time.
Download a scan of the printed zine [PDF].
From the zine:
I invite you to go looking, in the floorboards, down the street, in the library, in the database, on your networks, for the bad archives that surround us, neglected images and artifacts that deserve our attention.
Make your own bad archives. When we look closely, these artifacts flowing through time connect us to past and future worlds. They reveal us.
This talk was a messy assemblage, each part a scene that describes an impulse to save and to survive through small acts of sharing, each one a small view of a world that wasn’t meant to continue. I’ve mixed up publishing, archives, AI, and time travel in ways that might not be entirely legible. This talk describes my illegitimate publishing practice, and it’s a proposal for you to consider publishing as a small view. A provocation, to consider publishing as localized world building.
And please, consider this talk itself as a kind of bad archive. A history told through a collection of moments where queer life persists through technology and the impulse to save outside the institution, to contain that which capitalism and heteropatriarchy demand we forget. Scenes that “articulate the importance of assembling material objects: words, paper, evidence” (Laura E. Helton). This talk is a view from the future, into the future, spanning exactly 100 years, to connect us to the then and there of queer futurity, a kind of time travel where we get to be in conversation with ancestors, as we prepare ourselves to become ancestors.
Survival by Sharing zine included in a Queer.Archive.Work reading room installation at the whatreallymatters project space in Seoul, Korea (June 18–30, 2023).
The scenes—
Planet Street, Providence, RI 2022
Midjourney Discord Server 2022
Library of the Printed Web, NYC 2013
Ben Power, Sexual Minorities Archive, Holyoke, MA 2022
Gumby’s Book Studio, 2144 Fifth Ave, Harlem, NYC 1924
Community Memory, Leopold’s Record Shop, Berkeley, CA 1973
Binch Press / Queer.Archive.Work, Providence, RI 2023
Come!Unity Press, 13 E 17 St, NYC 1970
Congress Ave living room, Providence, RI 2023
The provocations—
1 searching for the emergent body
2 it started to resemble an archive
3 mean images (steyerl)
4 they felt like things I needed to see
5 bodily approximations
6 they reminded me of artifacts in archives
7 gaps and ruptures
8 hunting, grabbing, performing
9 an archive of archives
10 publishing as a worldview
11 an accumulation of accumulations
12 the collection is then almost an extension of my body and where my body goes (power)
13 the only safe place for such a collection is to take care of it in spaces where we live and work (power)
14 queer materials in queer hands (power)
15 telling the truth about people who are alive today and about people who are already dead (power)
16 bad archives
17 bad archives are sometimes illegible
18 a way to connect and preserve, and spread the word
19 the adventures of my scrapbooks (gumby)
20 community memory forms around the information
21 porous, queer space
22 community memory is community mindfulness, not-forgetfulness
23 communal disclosure, that which is left open, by us, to us
24 queer archive activism
25 queer archive work
26 the material circulates through queer time and space
27 holding space and objects and people and relations, but not containing them
28 a community memory portal
29 working against normative definitions of design success
30 survival by sharing
31 publishing as a small view
32 publishing as localized worldbuilding
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