Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr, The Piracy Project, KHM Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne, 2014.
Through an open call and independent research, The Piracy Project (Andrea Francke & Eva Weinmayr) has gathered more than one hundred pirated, emulated, or modified books from around the world. The approaches range from playful strategies of reproduction, modification, and reinterpretation of existing works, to attempts to circumvent enclosures such as censorship or market monopolies, to acts of piracy driven by commercial interests. This resource, catalogued online, serves as a starting point for conversations and working groups on originality, authorship, and the impact of copyright on collective practice.

The second exhibited project, Library of Inclusions and Omissions (LIO), is a community-run reading room that brings together intersectional, trans*feminist, and decolonial materials. This multifaceted and surprising archive is shaped by the experiences, struggles, and hopes of its users. By inviting participants to share which books, images, films, or texts they would like to contribute, this collective archive challenges the dominant processes of access, validation, and classification in institutional libraries of the Global North.

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Library Making as Practice

Wednesday, 5 November 2025
5:00 – 8:00 pm at distro, Basel

In times of algorithmic extraction and cultural amnesia, the library becomes a site of resistance — a space for making publics, sharing survival tools, and reimagining what it means to read, to care, and to know together.

Careful vs Careless: Library Custodians and Artificial Readers

5–17 November @ distro, Basel

Exhibition by Nick Thurston, Dušan Barok, founder of Monoskop, and Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, co-founders of Memory of the World at distro.