The Other Stitches: Forms of Collective Repair in Contemporary Book Arts

What possibilities can artistic publishing open up when it refuses authoritative, reproductive and exclusionary cultural norms? In what ways do the book arts, when treated as a relational medium between artmaking and community action, foreground a reparative stance, engaging strategies of mending broken aspects of social and cultural life? Attending to experimentation, collaboration, vulnerability and refusal, these strategies invite us to rethink collective repair as a politicized concept and process, opposed to the logics of improvement and reform.

This presentation will look at tactile objects, forms of knowledge and creative publishing strategies of individual artists, collectives and creative projects, such as Rowan Renee’s No Spirit For Me and Clarissa Sligh’s Transforming Hate, that challenge the carceral and colonial conditioning of our present by performing new material and conceptual relationships and transformations.

A virtual talk with 2023 Book Arts Research Fellow Caterina Stamou, held over Zoom, September 18th, 2024, 12:00 PM EST. If on mobile, scroll down to RSVP.

This program and the Book Arts Research Fellowship is generously supported by the Pine Tree Foundation of New York.