Why share? Commoning and queer feminist publishing / Anna Bierler

“How do we find new ways to construct culture, to imagine new societies, when the tools that we might use are restricted and bound up in systems of oppression?” Paul Soulellis (2018)

This workshop and lecture series takes Soulellis' question as its starting point to explore publishing as a practice of sharing, caring, and commoning. Commons are living infrastructures that are built through the accessibility and distribution of resources. They are organized within a defined community and maintained through co-creation and reciprocity. They offer counter-practices and counteraesthetics to the hierarchies of ownership, profit, and closure that shape the dominant forms of cultural production. Rather than focusing on the publication as a design object or repository of knowledge, the question “Why share?” turns to publishing as a continuous practice of rehearsals, infrastructures, and tactics of relation.

In conversation with practitioners from different areas of work and engagement, this series examines acts of sharing and distribution as queer_feminist strategies in the field of publishing. Together, we will ask how publishing can become an infrastructure of relation rather than isolation, and how the act of sharing itself can model other possible forms of living and working together.

Anna Bierler is an artist and graphic designer based in Rotterdam. Her work, across poetry, visual art, and performance, focuses on feminist temporalities, ecological entanglements, and reproductive futures, and how meaning is shaped in relation to others.

In her lecture performance, Everything, indeed, is at least double* Anna works through circulation, repetition and shoplifting.

Her workshop, Leaking Copies, is a collective copying and writing session that explores leakage, citation, and reproduction as feminist publishing practices. Participants are invited to bring a quote or object that means enough to reproduce and engage with the copy machine as collaborator. Through writing, copying, and physical gestures, the workshop considers what is lost and what circulates when we reproduce a text, a thought, or a body of work.

*Anne Carson, Albertine Workout