The Parasitic Reading Room Publishing as a political act.
Book Bloc Protests. Italy. 2011
“The ideal is not to build tools but to make bombs, because when you have used up your own bombs, nobody else can use them. And I must add that my dream, my personal dream, is not exactly to build bombs, because I don't like to kill people. I would like to write bookbombs - that means books that are useful just at the moment in which they are written or read by people. Then they would disappear. Books would be such that they would disappear soon after they have been read or used. Books should be a kind of bomb and nothing else. After the explosion, people could be reminded that the books made a very beautiful fireworks display. In later years historians and others could recount that such and such a book was useful as a bomb and was beautiful as fireworks.” —Michel Foucault via Alejandro Hernández on FB
The Parasitic Reading Room A Parasitic Reading Room is an open format gathering a multitude of voices. It is a spontaneous set of reading spaces. It is also a traveling school. Conformed by a group of people reading aloud a selection of texts, they require proximity, empathy and willingness to be affected by other voices and ideas. A Parasitic Reading Room intends to ‘parasite’ readers, passers-by, contents and places, and to provoke a contagion of knowledge. 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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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. The inextricable relationship between books and space is at the basis of this reader, which highlights 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. Poet and editor Adil Jussawalla remarks the need for publishing in order to spread critical thinking, something that historically has been the seed of several independent and even undercover movements and publishing practices, such as the samizdat on the years of the post-Stalin USSR— which writer Vladimir Bukovsky summarized as follows: "Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself."—or the xeroxing practices in Kolkata, to make books economically accessible to the population at large. In that sense, the goal of publishing is first and foremost to create those spaces for critical debate and insurgencies, that are described by writer Matthew Stadler
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when he wrote that "literature isn't made by writers, but readers. Only in reading does our encounter with the written word gain its political dimension." This 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. Such empathic spaces reveal themselves as critically important in times of nationalism exaltation and political irresponsibility.
—Ethel Baraona Poh, César Reyes Nájera dpr-barcelona.
The Parasitic Reading Room is an on-going project initiated by Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera (dpr-barcelona) and Rosario Talevi (raumlabor_berlin, Making Futures). 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]; The Parasitic Reading Room: Climate Care, for the Floating University [Berlin, August 2019]. Place, People and Time. Publishing as an artistic practice by The Mueseum of Loss and Renewal + My Bookcase [August 2019]; Making Futures Chicago Mobile Workshop for 3rd Chicago Architecture Biennial [November 2019]
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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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dpr-barcelona Presidents are Temporary, Books are Forever Source: Sampling Wu Tang is Forever, ChadPublishing Trutt, 2018. as a political act | 9
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Georges Perec The Page.
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Source: Spacies of Spaces. Penguin, 1974.
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Left: Ulises Carriรณn Source: The New Art of Making Books. VOID Distributors, 1980.
Right: Rebecca Solnit Source: The Faraway Nearby. Penguin, 2013.
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Kama No Hojoki (1212) Source: 'Atelier Bow Wow: A Primer' , 1996. 14 | Publishing as a political act
León Felipe I know all the tales. Source: El Pressentiment #68, 2018.
I don't know much, it's true. I only can tell, what I have seen. And I have seen: that the men's cradle is rocked with tales, that the men's cries of anguish are drowned in tales, that the men's weeping is silenced with tales,
that the men's bones are buried in tales, And that the men's fear is the origin of all tales. I only know very litte, it's true, but they made me fall asleep with all the tales. and I know all the tales. — León Felipe
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68
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www.elpressentiment.net
COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
I know all the tales
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PD Smith Street Language. Source: City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. Bloomsbury Press, 2012.
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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.
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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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Alberto Manguel The City of Words. Source: The City of Words. House of Anansi Press, 2007.
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Lina Bo Bardi Stones Against Diamonds. Source: Stones Against Diamonds. Architectural Association Publishing as a political act | 25 Publications, 2017.
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Alisdair Gray The Elite. Source: Lanark. Canongate Books Ltd., 2016. Publishing as a political act | 27
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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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George Henton, The Taksim Square Book Club. Al Jazeera, 2013.
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Brandon LaBelle Source: Handbook for the Itinerant. Sideways, 2012. Publishing as a political act | 31
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Russian teenager Olga Misik reading the Russian constitution while being surrounded by armed Russian riot police, August 2019. Foto via @joybhattacharj on twitter
Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarism. Source: Facebook comment, HT Evangelina Guerra Lujรกn. January 2019.
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Vilem Flusser Source: Does Writing Has a Future? University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Publishing as a political act | 35
Lesley Naa Norle Lokko Source: White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
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Alberto Manguel The Library at Night Source: The Library at Night. Yale University Press, 2006.
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Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby Source: The Faraway Nearby. Viking, 2013. Publishing as a political act | 39
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Meghan Cox Gurdon Rediscovering the Lost Power of Reading Aloud. Source: Literary Hub. (lithub.com), January 22, 2020.
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Roland Barthes Voice. Source: The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang, 1975.
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William H. Gass The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words. Source: World Within the Word. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.
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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 CĂŠsar Reyes NĂĄjera, 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
The Friday Lecture Series. Mackintosh School of Architecture Under the title "Architect(ure) on Thresholds / in Transition" in 2020 the series explores new forms of analysis, collaboration and production for architectural practice in a scenario of rapidly changing urban settings, accumulated ecological concerns, demands for spatial flexibility and questions of preservation. What are contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to emerging architectural and urban demands? More on Friday Lecture Series: http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa-events/ filter-by-type/4677/architecturefriday-lecture www.gsa.ac.uk @GSofA
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The Parasitic Reading Room Publishing as a Political Act dpr-barcelona's installment of the Parasitic Reading Room for the The Friday Lecture Series. Mackintosh School of Architecture "Architect(ure) on Thresholds / in Transition" February 7th, 2020