The Parasitic Reading Room Books as spaces of encounter.
Film still from Toute la mĂŠmoire du monde, directed by Alain Resnais. France, 1956.
"The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were 15, it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, 'Harper’s Magazine, February 2008.
The Parasitic Reading Room Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis define ‘The Parasitic Council’ as that place “where a public space can be the plateau for the occupancy of a commonhold in order that it performs multiple parasitic functions of common use without claims to property.” Following this protocol of action and occupancy of the city, we have started a series of reading rooms called Parasitic Reading Room, which are nomad, spontaneous and parasitic set of reading spaces that often take place along cultural venues and events, or any other spot in the city, with the intention of 'parasite' ideas, contents and places, in order to provoke a contagion of knowledge. This Parasitic Reading Room—an offline engagement for 'PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME publishing as an artistic practice'—is composed by a set of readings underlying the importance of books as spaces of encounters, how publishing is a political act and reading, a form of resistance. 4 | Publishing as a political act
Above: Judith Quinlan and Ellen Woodworth on a Bookmobile, delivering feminist books, 1974. Below: Book launch of Archipelago of Protocols, with the Urban School Ruhr, Athens, 2016.
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The inextricable relationship between books and space is at the basis of our understanding of books as spaces of encounter, and the importance of publishing and reading heterogeneous books— whether fiction, poetry or critical theory—in order to create these new kinds of spaces, where empathy, alterity, and otherness are stronger than ideologies. Matthew Stadler often declares that "litearture isn't made by writers, but readers. Only in reading does our encounter with the written word gain its political dimension." The moment when writing, often carried out in solitude, is published, circulated and made accessible to everyone is the moment of generating public space, argues the French philosopher and art historian Georges DidiHuberman. For writer Ulises Carrión, the book is a sequence of spaces, "each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments." By reading aloud we share a space of intimacy—a time and place of learning not only from the contents, but from the nuances, the accents, the cadence of the reading. Abigail Williams called this ‘the social life of books,’ "How books are read is as important as what’s in them," she pointed. This means spaces where different books coexist and enrich each other; books as the necessary space where the author can have a dialogue with the reader, where different readers can read between the lines and find a place of exchange, where to debate, and discuss ideas. Poet and editor Adil Jussawalla remarks the need for publishing in order to spread critical thinking, by sharing his advice "start your own home publishing programme by Xeroxing a favourite book of yours which is out of print and which you’d like others to read. Sell it at cost to a friend, at a profit to those who aren’t friends and at twice the price to an enemy [...] Good books have to be kept in print and Xeroxing them is one way of doing it." Perhaps the essential question at this point is what kind of readings should form this alternative bibliography about the importance of publishing and its political agenda, that come not 6 | Publishing as a political act
only [but also] from the pages of our favourite books? This question can have multiple answers which all of them are to be intertwined, multi-connected, overlapped. Poems, films, instagram photos and its captions, songs, e-mail exchanges, objects, conversations with friends over a glass of wine or a coffee, dreams; we learn from all of them albeit [or often because] the hectic diversity of formats, and sometimes its lack of seriousness. And this shared and common learning is the seed for comradeship. It reminds us that reading together, whether silently or aloud, forces us to interact, to respect the times and rhythms of others, to learn new words and their sounds, and to think anew. In doing so, we rediscover diverse territories of empathy that become visible when visiting these spaces of encounter, where we learn that we can host otherness as part of the self. Places where comradeship is a means instead of an end.
—Ethel Baraona Pohl, César Reyes Nájera dpr-barcelona.
The Parasitic Reading Room is an on-going project initiated by dpr-barcelona and the Open Raumlabor University. The installments include so far: the Istanbul Design Biennial 2018, A school of schools [Istanbul, September 2018]; Repair Acts readings led by Rosario Talevi, as part of RepairActs, International Network Meeting & Conversation, Bristol [February 2019]; Friend/ships: l’amitié comme moyen de transmission, with Rebekka Kiesewetter, Continent, and dpr-barcelona, Centre culturel suisse, Paris [March 2019]; Una ciudad de diferencias for the Architecture Week 2019 [Barcelona, May 2019]; and The Parasitic Reading Room: Climate Care, for the Floating University [Berlin, August 2019].
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CĂŠsar Aira in Tamar Shafrir's hand Athena Magazine. Source: The Musical Brain: And Other Stories. New Directions, 2015. Reading as a form of resistance | 9
Homi K. Bhabha The Right to Narrate. Source: 'Do You Read Me?', Harvard Design Magazine #38, 2014.
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Matthew Stadler The Politi of Literature. Source: Potatoes and Rice. Unpublished manuscript, 2015.
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Chris Kraus The New Universal. Source: Social Practices. Semiotext(e) Active Agents Series, 2018.
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Georges Perec The Page. Source: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Penguin, 1974.
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Alejandro Zambra The Silence of Telling. Source: Not to Read. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018.
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And the commissar is telling my fortune While the radio plays, But the priest has promised an Austin Seven. For Duggie always pays. I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls, And woke to find it true; I wasn’t born for an age like this; Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the
George Orwell Why I Write. Source: Why I Write. Penguin Books, 2004.
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Reading Raafat Majzoub's Naked at Nature – A Night School, an event on the framework of Parckdesign (curated by Gilly Karjevski, Judith Wielander, and Alexander Romer).
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the public order. -The library functions in three times at once: the past, the present and the future. It maintains a link to the past, exists in the present, and anticipates the needs of the future, informing it about what was once important to the past. -The primary building block of the library is the book. The book is itself an element that links past (the moment of its writing) to present (the moment of its reading) to future (the many future moments of its re-reading by different readers). It links imagined sensations to real ones. It links writer to reader and reader to reader, even if those links are never spoken or shared. Books placed next to one another in a library create links to one another, to a whole network of knowledge that is human endeavor. -Each book is an act of hope. The act of writing is the human will to create narrative out of chaos, meaning out of its rubble, lessons out of experience. The book itself is a sort of utopia. -Books shape readers. Somewhere along the line, every reader, by the mere act of reading and imaginging, remembers their rights and responsibilities as citizens toward the State. -The responsibility of citizens is to unshape the State. To keep unshaping the State until it takes on the right shape. -The library is a place of hope, even when placed within the hopeless terrain of the State.
VOLOGUE Daily accounts by Lina Mounzer
Lina Mounzer
21.09.2014
Vologue. Source: Unfold #1: A Library Where the Books Have Melted Into One Another and the Titles Have Faded Away, Sara Giannini (ed.). The Volume Project, 2015.
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Ainsworth Rand Spofford The Art of Reading. Source: A Book for All Readers. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1900.
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Audre Lorde The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. Source: I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Left: Ulises Carriรณn Source: The New Art of Making Books. VOID Distributors, 1980.
Right: Rebecca Solnit Source: The Faraway Nearby. Reading as a form of resistance | 25 Penguin, 2013.
George Henton, The Taksim Square Book Club. Al Jazeera, 2013.
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Brandon LaBelle Source: Handbook for the Itinerant. Sideways, 2012. Reading as a form of resistance | 27
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis Source: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013. 28 | Publishing as a political act
Michalis Pichler Statements on Appropriation. Source: Publishing Manifestos. Miss Read, 2018.
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Alberto Manguel The Last Page. Source: A history of reading. Vintage Canada, 1998.
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Book Bloc protest against Berlusconi’s education reform, 2011.
Vilem Flusser Source: Does Writing Has a Future? University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 34 | Publishing as a political act
BOOK BLOC SHIELD 1
2
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Secure the side holes tightly with cable ties. Cut off the ends that are sticking out.
Plexiglas Foam rubber
Insert a single length of rope into the holes to form the arm handles.
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Cardboard Foam rubber Plexiglas
Layer the five sheets of material as shown above. Drill three holes on each long side of the block and two holes for each of the rope handles.
Place your arm in the rope handles to make sure it fits well, then tie the ends of the rope from the front.
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Cut off the ends of the rope from the front. Think carefully about which book will represent you. Use paint or spray paint to draw the cover artwork.
Disobedient Objects
Hold your ground! Place your arms in the rope handles and use the shield to nonviolently push back against police containment lines. Practice using the shields in group formations for display and protection. Remember you are turning the media’s ‘story of the battle’ into a battle over the story.
Book Bloc Shield, from the 'How-to Guides,' Disobedient Objects, V&A Museum, 2015.
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Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug Tomislav Medak Public Library (essay). Source: Public Library. What, How & for Whom / WHW, 2015.
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Virginia Woolf Letter to Vita Sackville-West Source: Congenial Spirits. Selected Letters. Pimlico, 2003.
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Roland Barthes Voice. Source: The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang, 1975.
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Mark Proosten, Mike Schäfer Space is Only Words. Source: Published in the context of the exhibition Space Is Only Words at LABforYOU an architectural laboratory in Sittard (NL), 2011.
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Mette Edvardsen Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon. Source: 'Rewriting the Book,' Sven Lütticken. Dissect Journal, 2015.
SvEN lüttIckEN could hardly appear to be more anachronistic in an age in which we have vast repositories at our fingertips, and can be ever more reliant on search functions. As Edvardsen remarks: To memorise a book, or more poetically ‘to learn a book by heart’, is in a way a rewriting of that book. In the process of memorising, the reader for a moment steps into the place of the writer, or rather he/she is becoming the book. Maybe the ability to learn a whole book by heart is relative to what book you choose, the time you invest, and perhaps your skills. But, however much or well you learn something by heart you have to keep practicing it otherwise you will forget it again. Perhaps by the time you reach the end you will have forgotten the beginning. Learning a book by heart is an ongoing activity and doing. There is nothing final or material to achieve, the practice of learning a book by heart is a continuous process of remembering and forgetting.23 For a number of years, the Utrecht-based feminist art Reading as a form of resistance | 41 collective Read-in had been organising unannounced reading event in people’s private homes—ringing doorbells and
Alberto Manguel The Library as Power. Source: The Library at Night. Alfred A. Knopf Canada., 2006.
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Matthew Stadler What are Margins? Source: Composition as publication and (The Social Life of Books). Paraguay Press, 2015.
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Images: Sara Giannini, Unfold #1: A Library Where the Books Have Melted Into One Another and the Titles Have Faded Away. The Volume Project, 2015.
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Mara ZĂźst Libraries of Workers and Dreamers. Source: Kolkata. City of Print. Spector Books, 2019. Reading as a form of resistance | 45
Ronald Ross 1897 original notebook records of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes. Source: Memoirs with a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and Its Solution, J. Murray, 1923.
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Disclaimer: A parasite does not ask permission to interact, it nourishes itself from its host, and causes changes for good and for bad... it depends on who tells the story. The parasitized texts in these reader are reproduced without asking permission, the only reason is its nutritional value for the survival of a non-mercantilized form of school. As if a genetic trail the source is cited the result is uncertain and it only depends on who reads it.
dpr-barcelona is an architectural research practice and independent publishing house founded by Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera, dealing with three main lines: publishing, criticism and curating. Their work explore how architecture as discipline reacts in the intersection with politics, technology, economy and social issues. dpr-barcelona is member of Future Architecture. www.dpr-barcelona.com @dpr_barcelona My Bookcase explores the role of the book and its reader in today’s society. Through workshops, events and collaborations, My Bookcase’s aim is to empower the reader by offering a creative space to unfold the knowledge gathered through private readings. And bring individual knowledge into shared experience. www.mybookcase.org @my_book_case
PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME, publishing as an artistic practice is a residency designed to stimulate new ways of thinking and experimentation through production, research, learning and presentation. Residents will work collectively and individually. The residency is devised around the idea of the book as a platform for creative encounters. By listening, looking and making residents will investigate image, text, typography, object and context relationships. The Museum of Loss and Renewal is a roaming art practice nurtured by Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen. It offers space, time and contexts for making and sharing with a focus on the challenges we face in our individual and social lives. themuseumoflossandrenewal.life @LossRenewal
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The Parasitic Reading Room Books as spaces of encounter dpr-barcelona's offline engagement for 'PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME publishing as an artistic practice' a residency organized by The Museum of Loss and Renewal + My Bookcase