Reuse as a critical, political practice

Piracy Project Reading Room, Bluecoat Liverpool, in the exhibition Resource (18 July – 27 September 2015). Image credit: Bluecoat.

How do we understand feminist anti-colonial thinker Kathrine McKittrick when she proposes to “make something one’s own” rather than ‘owning’ it? What does this approach mean for a collective artistic practice? Under which circumstances would we see reuse as critical and relational practice and when as extractive appropriation.

Claudia Hummel and Eva Weinmayr will present a selection of pirated publications from their respective projects in order to use these concrete examples to reflect on the situations and circumstances in which cultural practices of reuse, sharing and redistribution can intervene in hegemonic power structures or at best repeat and reinforce these hierarchies.

Eva Weinmayr initiated together with Peruvian artist Andrea Franke the Piracy Project (2010–2015, London), gathering more than one hundred pirated, modified and appropriated books. The collection forms the starting point for talks and work sessions on collective knowledge practices (and their limits), as well as on common concepts of originality and authorship. Eva is currently a guest professor for Critical Access | Publishing at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.

Claudia Hummel, as part of her dissertation project on educational history, has compiled a small collection of reprints from the West German and West Berlin children’s shop movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She is interested in the texts reproduced therein, many of which date back to the 1920s, which informed the educational field of the New Left at the time, and in the self-image of work in the educational field, the work of (self-)publishing. Claudia leads the major ‘Critical Social Practice in Art Education’ of the Master’s programme in Art Education at the ZHdK.

The talk takes place as part of the seminar Publishing and Sharing by Eva Weinmayr in the module Sustainable Practices for Precarious Environments in the major Critical Social Practices in Art Education at ZHdK Zurich.