Publishing as social practice

Publishing as social practice

In his study on the power and politics of the archive - Archive Fever -, Jacques Derrida outlines the aporetic desire that defines the archive, describing it as an illness that strives to reconcile the will to safeguard significant documents in human history with the wish to share those documents with others. For many academics, researchers, and students, archives used to be and still are contentious ground, guarded tightly by the archivist/gatekeeper whose relationship with the material is very different than that of the researcher. The archivist aims to preserve and protect; the researcher hopes to explore and experience. 

In this frame, the workshop aims at exploring the limits of an archive: legal, ethical, by common sense, and its implication through the art practice. The three days encounter will propose to put in practice a way of understanding accessibility, trying to find antecedents and arguments against the privatization of knowledge. We believe that art practice is historically based in open processes of des-hierarquization that opens the possibilities of experiences. In that sense this workshop is about interrogating the role and use of the archive. 

The workshop will develop in three moments:

• 26th October – On-site visit and explorations of two archives in Geneva: 

- Archives contestataires. From many social movements of the second half of the 20th century: counter-culture, anti-militarism, patient rights, fight against nuclear power, social struggles, counter-information, anti-imperialism, student struggles, etc.

- Centre Grisélidis Réal. International documentation center and library on prostitution.

Meeting at 8:30

at Archives contestataires
2 bis rue de la Tannerie
1227 Carouge

• 27th October – Editing work in the atelier. From texts, images and documentation that opens the visit to the archives we will work on a collective form of edition to make public on the next day. Printed matter or other reproduction techniques will be part of the process.

Meeting at 9:30

at master TRANS–,
Boulevard Helvétique 9,
1205 Genève,
3rd floor, room 37.

• 28th October – Collective action - intervention in the public sphere from the edited material. 

Meeting at 9:30

at master TRANS–,
Boulevard Helvétique 9,
1205 Genève,
3rd floor, room 37.

This Workshop is based on the collective practice of MACACO Press, created by Sabrina Fernandez Casas (1988 - Switzerland) and Patricio Gil Flood (1977 – Argentina), based in Genève.  Under the form of an art association that collaborate with other people, MACACO Press centers its activity in the research and production related to contemporary edition, exploring the extension of the ideas of reediting, translating and infiltrating. They conceive the action of activating materials in circulation as a performance that produce not only a specific way of sociability, but its possibility of reformulating it.