Library Making as Practice

Abstract

In this presentation, Eva Weinmayr discusses tactics and strategies of library making to build knowledge infrastructures that contest enclosures and draw attention to power asymmetries and develop trans*feminist practices of reuse. Drawing on The Piracy Project — developed with Peruvian artist Andrea Francke and comprising over one hundred pirated, copied, appropriated, and modified books from around the world — she discusses methods of circumventing intellectual enclosures while also confronting the colonial entanglements embedded in ideas of universal openness and access. The second project, Library of Inclusions and Omissions (LIO), is a temporary, community-run reading room focused on queer, intersectional trans*feminist and anti-colonial resources. Asking the readers which book, picture, film, text they would like to share with this library community, this collective resource challenges dominant systems of gate-keeping, validation and classification prevailing in institutional libraries in the Global North. Whose knowledges are included, how are they described, and how can they be found? The presentation took place in the context of Critical Media Lab Colloquium, organised by Lucie Kolb with invited guests Nick Thurston and Eva Weinmayr, moderated by Stefanie Bräuer.