Non-Public Publics

Smuggling the Future: Publishing as Creation of Slow Time

Workshop with Shivangi Mariam Raj

Deploying a volumetric approach to both language and architecture, this talk focuses on publishing practices under colonial and carceral contexts. It examines tactics, forms, and materialities of publishing as a political instrument and a pedagogical tool. In thinking about how captives and prisoners decelerate time, create channels of circulation amidst temporal interstices, and smuggle the temporalities of wait, it looks at publishing’s potential for defying the settler logics of containment and fragmentation. Because space and time are so tightly interlaced in a prison, an attack in one dimension necessarily weakens the other, thereby bending the spacetime continuum that grants the prison its imperishability. The talk will be followed by a workshop that carries this temporal rhythm of the dark and the negative into developing a cumulative text with a language that grapples with its own failure, a language that is obscure to the perpetrators, a language that does away with the need to insist on evidence and rather works to restore the link between meaning and mourning, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Together with the participants, we will create a publication-object by using eclipse as methodology, by building counterarchival densities, and by reflecting on the volume of absence.

Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer and cultural worker based between Delhi and Paris. As an independent researcher, she is interested in visual and spatial cultures of violence against the minoritized and the colonized across South Asia and West Asia. Her practice dwells in the negative, combining approaches in sociolinguistics, sound, photography, countercartographies, and translation. She utilizes essays, poetry, and reportage for individual memory to coalesce into a broader inquiry of the politics of public remembering. Her work has consistently challenged the foundational mythologies of the Indian state and its networks of accumulation across caste, capital, and colony. She continues to focus on spectral temporalities as forms of resistance in Kashmir. She is a university dropout and was previously working with Oxford University Press. She has been the 2024–25 Editorial Fellow for Logic(s) Magazine at the INCITE Center of Columbia University as well as the recipient of the Graham Foundation’s 2024 grant for research for her project, “Shadow Thresholds: Architecture of Ruin in India.” Her work with The Funambulist focuses on the politics of space and bodies. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript that examines the material and political economy of rubble across its aesthetic, architectural, and affective registers.

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The Book Before Printing

Workshop with Erin Honeycutt / Cutt Press

The index of The Book Before Printing (1982) will guide a speculative history of book culture, the origins of writing, and authorship. We will use this index as an inventory of forms to select from, arrange, and press into new writing. Working through categories like scribe, seal, colophon, and palimpsest, participants will build texts that borrow the index’s own logic of classification while unsettling it. What does it mean to write “after” a form rather than as its sole originator, following Sezgin Boynik’s argument that bibliography is not a neutral record but a collectivizing, politically charged act.

Erin Honeycutt is a writer and bookmaker based in Berlin, where they run CUTT PRESS. They have taught across art and writing, including Video Art at the Iceland University of the Arts and the “Radical Publishing” seminar at the UdK Berlin. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Dear Enheduanna (2025, Ugly Duckling Presse) and the prose and poetry collection Night School (2026, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE), as well as numerous self-published ephemera.

CUTT PRESS is a publishing project founded in 2020, growing out of a bookselling practice at Hopscotch Reading Room, a Berlin bookstore for queer and anticolonial perspectives. The press is curious about bootlegging aesthetics, the materiality of writing, and an ongoing dialogue with its tools.

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Curating Data, Fermenting Ecologies

Workshop with Magda Tyżlik-Carver

Working with diagrams is to hold things open to many possible interpretations. This workshop start from the Curating Data diagram, a way of mapping curatorial operations such as collecting, classifying, archiving and displaying as relations that never quite settle. Diagramming practice lets us navigate between differently sourced and attributed readings of the same thing, rather than settling on one, seemingly preferred answer or description. Curating Data diagram treats this non-closure as affordance not a problem to fix. We will test this process by starting from a jar of ferments that are alive and changing. We will trace what’s in the jar and what surrounds it: the hands holding it, tastes of it, microbes transforming it. And we will see how open and legible can the diagram stay.

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture in the Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, and co-Director of the Centre for Critical Data Practices, both at Aarhus University. She works with the concept of posthuman curating to inquire into computational and data cultures. Currently her focus is on the digital transformation in knowledge making practices driven by AI technologies, semantic web, and data infrastructures. As a curator and researcher she develops participatory methods for data practices beyond BigTech extractivism and expansive infrastructural politics by working with speculative methods and open data principles (Fermenting Data, common practice), as well as knowledge graphs, diagrams and guides (Curating Data). As an independent curator she curated exhibitions and events including: Fermenting Data: Aaarhus 8000-8220 (2021), ScreenShots: Desire and Automated Image (2019), and Movement Code Notation (2018). She is co-editor of Curating Superintelligences. A Reader on AI and Future Curating (2025) and Executing Practices (2018), both published by Open Humanities Press in Data Browser series. She is also co-author of Boundary Images (2023), published by Minnesota Unviersity Press. She regularly writes about digital and visual cultures with focus on digital images and curating, contributing to edited collections, journals and magazines.

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MINE/MINE

Workshop with Qingyi Ren and Jisoo Lim

MINE/MINE originates from a series of participatory board-game workshops that explore queer coming-out experiences through collective play. The workshop takes the form of a tabletop storytelling game using prompt cards and simple interaction mechanics. Through turns of play, participants respond to scenarios and questions related to themes such as secrecy, risk, support, and community, sharing personal reflections or speculative situations.

Within Playable Publishing: Game as Method for Practice-Based Research, the game functions as a research device and publishing method. Gameplay facilitates conversation while producing narrative fragments, notes, and shared reflections. These materials are collectively documented and become part of an evolving archive of queer coming-out stories.

Rather than treating participants as interview subjects, the workshop invites them to take part as players and co-authors, generating knowledge through play while forming a temporary space of mutual listening, care, and safety.

Before You Join: We ask everyone to approach this space with openness and respect. Any form of hatred or discrimination will not be tolerated.

Qingyi Ren (任晴宜, They/Them) is a Researcher and artist at the Critical Media Lab Basel. They work at the intersection of AI, digital culture, and queer theory, examining how algorithmic systems shape and misrecognize gender and identity through artistic research on facial recognition, machine translation, and generative AI.

Jisoo Lim (she/they) is a game designer and researcher currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Humanities at the University of Basel. Her work combines game design, critical media studies, and practice-based research to explore the experiences of marginalized communities within social and religious contexts. Their works, including Sena and Their Garden, have been showcased at international festivals such as IDFA DocLab(NE), A MAZE(DE), and London Games Festival (UK), where they have been recognized for their experimental approach that bridges design research and interactive storytelling. Their broader interests include queer temporality, playfulness, and the role of digital storytelling in enabling social intervention and community-driven forms of knowledge production.

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Double Double. A Pop-up Critique of Visual Economy

Workshop by Benedikt Reichenbach

Double Double. A Pop-up Critique of Visual Economy is a practice-based research project developed as a memory game with 22 non-identical pairs from a delirious variety all across history of visual culture, publishing, design, and architecture.

If modernity is one thing, it is divisiveness. Identity as we know it emerges from this experience, from the complex dynamic of domination and liberation and the struggle of who-gets-what. While “we all have become cameras” (Deborah Levy), the game with doubles plays with this complexity. Along the development of the terms “double image” and “visual economy”, Double Double explores the social, political, and material dimensions of image production and consumption.

Conceived as a podium event, the project proposes an experimental, collective mode of research into the politics of representation. The form of the game addresses and lays out the topic non-synthetically, non-conclusively, as an easy-to-access jumping board for spontaneous personal association, where even if you loose, you win.

Benedikt Reichenbach has worked as a graphic designer and editor since 2008, following studies in history and philosophy. In 2015–16, he was a grantee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP). In 2014, he published Harun Farocki Diagrams. Images from Ten Films (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne); in 2017, Pasolini’s Bodies and Places (Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich). In 2020, his research project on the French graphic designer Jacques Daniel (1920–2011), who began his career producing false papers for the French Resistance, received funding from the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap).

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