Shelf Life of the Library reflects on what kind of artistic, activist and more broadly research strategies can be adopted in order to re-evaluate, and potentially expand the dominant narratives that frame how we understand past, present and future. We invite you to join Alan Smart, Mariana Lanari, Heide Hinrichs and Elizabeth Haines in exploring – provocatively, playfully, curiously – legacies of resistance and critical social action, and the contemporary negotiation of these histories in printed matter.

Collective and self-initiated publishing day

A conversation with Erica Overmeer and Alan Smart on the intersections of print media and publishing as forms, and modes of political practice – framed as protest, action or activism, and demonstration.

readers: Susana Vargas Cervantes, Erin Madarieta, Jack Henrie Fisher, Ana Segovia, Mariajo Montijano, Juan Gómez, Alan Smart

Jack Henrie Fisher, in conversation with Anuar Portugal, in an ambling illustrated critical delineation of what is called, in graphic design, visual identity, of the ways in which graphic design helps capitalism to organize and subjugate the world through the concept of identity. This critique of visual identity is aimed at the system of forms that disciplines and controls people and things, and concludes with a wish fulfillment / alternate reality scenario about the communism of corporate modernism.

readers: Hannah Bruckmüller, Evan Fusco, Verónica Casado Hernández, Erin Madarieta, Nat Pyper, Michal B. Ron

Other Forms will host a discussion at the Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin (Kurfurstenstrasse 14), joined by designer and writer Cornelia Durka. In the context of a discussion about the political aspirations and contexts of independent publishing, Cornelia will present her recent research into the Handbuch der Raubdrucke. In 1973, the lawyer and private collector of pirated editions, Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen, published, together with Christa Gnirß, this comprehensive bibliography which documents the publishing praxis of the German-speaking New Left during four years (1968-1971). Cornelia will discuss how these “socialized prints and proletarian reprints“ clashed with copyright law, challenged library science, and exposed even progressive writers as loyal to the bourgeois conception of intellectual property.