AND Publishing is an alternative publishing initiative based in London. It was founded by Lynn Harris and Eva Weinmayr in 2009, and is run today by run Eva Weinmayr and Rosalie Schweiker.
AND Publishing is concerned with the social, cultural, and political implications of publishing and going public in the wider sense. They explored piracy as cultural strategies, investigated informal forms of book distribution, maintain reading groups, and engage in various activities around books, reading, publishing, and knowledge strategies in general. They work on the premises of publishing as an artistic strategy, and with a strong background in feminist thinking.
Self-description:
AND is a publishing activity based in London. Having started in 2009 to explore the immediacy and social possibilities of print on demand – AND can be described today as a multiplicity of alliances that don’t fit together smoothly. We collaborate with people and institutions. We develop informal distributions networks and explore the social agency of cultural piracy (the Piracy Project, with Andrea Francke). We are invested in feminist radical pedagogy (Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? Valand Academy working group), and publish pocket manuals (Teaching for people who prefer not to teach, with Mirjam Bayerdörfer). We build informal support structures, re-distribute budgets, commission work, and (re-)publish material which is difficult to find. We create reading rooms (Library of Omissions and Inclusions), share a studio, provide resources and advice, as well as access to skills, means of production and distribution. We’re having conversations and debates, conflicts, and negotiations – online, offline, and in print.
Therefore, we started recently to learn how to box and unbox.
Why do we publish? How do we publish? For whom do we publish? What does it mean to understand our work not as a ‘noun’, but as a ‘verb’? Where do we put the many things we’re doing, that don’t fit into boxes? What’s the problem with categorization? How do we resist the demand for individual authorship? Why do we NOT want a unified face? How can we subvert the social pressure to produce faces? How do you ‘work politically’ instead of making work ‘about politics’? What’s the problem with writing a colophon in the book? How do we negotiate with institutional bodies? Why would we go on a residency when we struggle to pay rent at home? Where can we store our boxes? How long does it take to travel to Stockholm from London by train? Why do we all speak English? Why is what we are doing called research or education and not art? Where did we meet? What happens if we don’t work together anymore? Who has invited us and why? How are we spending the budget? Do we want to stay in a two-bedroom or a one-bedroom apartment? Do you want tea? Have you read the S.C.U.B manifesto? What’s the Wif password? Which objects didn’t we bring because we were worried they might get stolen? How do we make this residency visible? Who has the time to engage? What can we make public? When does the residency end? Who would be our ideal boxing teacher? What happens if we hurt ourselves? Who gives in? Who compromises? Who accommodates? Who cares? Who edits? Who organizes? Who translates? Do we need a new, less tired, and exclusive language to talk about all of this? And how do you document laughter?
Further resources and texts:
The Piracy Project, and the collection’s searchable online catalog
The Piracy Project, interview by Cornelia Sollfrank, Giving what you don’t have.
Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?, Valand Academy, U. Of Gothenburg
Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community, in “Publishing as Artistic Practice”, ed Annette Gilbert, Sternberg Press 2016
The Impermanent Book, Rhizome, 2012
One Publishes to Find Comrades, in Visual Event, ed. Oliver Klimpel, Spector Books Leipzig 2014
Interview
The Micropolitics of Publishing. Interview with Eva Weinmayr
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 15 September 2018
