Library Making as Practice

Public libraries are among the last collective infrastructures for accessing and producing knowledge. Yet they are also shaped by histories of inclusion and exclusion — reflecting whose voices are heard, remembered, and valued. In an era of increasingly centralized digital infrastructures and algorithmic gatekeeping, the act of keeping knowledge public — of making books and ideas collectively accessible — has never been more urgent. To defend the library is to defend the possibility of shared, non-commercial, and de-individualized access to knowledge.

The colloquium builds on two exhibitions at distro drawing together a range of tactics and strategies to library making as practice. It brings together artists who work with and through libraries to rethink the power asymmetries in the ways how knowledge circulates and how publics are formed.

Nick Thurston approaches library making as an artistic practice — not only as the building of repositories, but as the creation of living systems that organize and connect our shared cultures of production and reception. For a library to stay alive, he argues, it must keep changing — updating, cataloguing, and linking communities — to make the very life of the public library a shared concern. In collective processes of re-imagining what a public library could be, the speculative character of art gives us a mode for action, one full of permissions but also fraught with unhelpful obsessions about authority and property. His reflections will situate libraries within our broader infrastructures for public-ness and the ongoing struggles to defened their transparency and porosity, particularly in connectiuon to networks of independent publishing and digital archiving.

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 libary 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?

In a follow-up discussion moderated by Stefanie Bräuer, Nick Thurston and Eva Weinmayr will consider library making as a tool for world-building, survival, and path-finding. Drawing on artistic and activist traditions, the conversation explores how libraries can operate as spaces of resilience, resistance, and shared resources.

These reflections resonate with distro, a self-organized research library by Lucie Kolb and Philipp Messner within the studio space ADW11, which experiments with publishing as a political and collective practice and hosts two parallel exhibitions by Nick Thurston, Dušan Barok, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Eva Weinmayr.

Organised by Stefanie Bräuer, Lara Kothe, Philipp Messner, and Lucie Kolb.