In her inaugural lecture, Lucie Kolb, Professor and Head of the Make/Sense PhD Program at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures, frames critical publishing as an urgency to act. What forms of critique can respond to this crisis?
The lecture approaches this question through bibliography-making, understood as going beyond producing reference lists to building infrastructures of orientation. These shape what becomes visible and valued, how resources circulate, and how directions might be shifted. They gather what is necessary for intellectual and political survival and share the costs of that work.
Lucie develops this approach through her work with the distro library at Infospace Basel and the magazine Brand-New-Life. Drawing on feminist and reparative frameworks, this work explores how critique can be sustained through shared reading and collective practice, and which forms remain effective amid authoritarian power relations.
Contributing to this thinking, Laura Pregger and Gabriela Aquije Zegarra draw on plant relatives’ knowledges and mutual aid strategies to share an embodied spring rehearsal informed by Reciprocity, Interdependence, and Boundaries (RIB), nourishing the bibliography through radical tender literacies.
Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb is a scholar of critical publishing with a background in visual arts, art history, and cultural studies. Her work involves studying and producing artistic knowledge, e.g., practice-oriented writing and transversal publishing. She is interested in identifying, studying, and developing infrastructural practices with a particular focus on knowledge infrastructures such as libraries, collections and archives. Lucie works with practice-based methods, archival work, and field studies. Her research addresses hidden mechanisms and structures that create social injustice in knowledge organizations and considers how collective work on infrastructures of knowledge is foundational for common intellectual practice and proposes ways to conceptualize infrastructural imaginaries otherwise.
Since 2023, Lucie has been the principal investigator of the SNSF-funded project Sharing Knowledge in the Arts, analyzing computational infrastructural practices and articulating open sharing practices. She also was the principal investigator of the swissuniversities funded project Critical FAIRness (2023–24), an exploratory study investigating questions of “accessibility” and “re-use” regarding research data in the arts and held an FHNW Fellowship for Critical Publishing and Research-based Learning in Art and Design (2022-24). Lucie is a founding member and co-editor of the open-access journal Brand-New-Life. At IXDM, HGK Lucie is a Professor and teaches on the MA Transversal Design. She is the Head of the MAKE/SENSE PhD programme promoting practice-based research in art and design.
What role can publishing play in organizing critique today? This series in the open access journal Brand-New-Life looks at historical and contemporary practices that approach publishing as an infrastructure for political organization, collective knowledge production, and the formation of counter-publics.
«What Is Critical Publishing?» is edited by Lucie Kolb and Jonas von Lenthe as an outlet of the Make/Sense PhD Program at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.