Paul Soulellis
Urgentcraft: Radical Publishing During Crisis

Publishing is “making public”. Publishing is political. Publishing can compel, persuade, inform, attract, confuse, script, or manipulate. Urgent acts of making public can mobilize communities and inspire change. In crisis, we see independent artists, community organizers, scholars, and activists collectively engaging with sophisticated modes of publishing to record and communicate in real time, while those in traditional positions of power use those same tools to engineer and control our defining narratives.

This syllabus focuses in particular on those queer strategies of resistance, refusal, and survival. As an overarching idea, urgentcraft explores the potential for radical publishing to gather and mobilize people around urgent artifacts and messages. As a syllabus, urgentcraft presents a range of artists, projects, texts, and concepts that foreground those strategies in recent history, as well as in contemporary independent publishing. As an expanding set of principles, urgentcraft identifies anti-racist ways of working in crisis, using art and design to fuel emancipatory projects and the movement towards liberation.

– Paul Soulellis

 
 

URGENTCRAFT Radical Publishing During Crisis: A Narrative Syllabus in 19 Parts

https://soulellis.com/writing/post-documenta/index.html

download URGENTCRAFT as .pdf

 

Paul Soulellis is an artist and educator based in Providence, RI (USA). His practice includes teaching, writing, and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies and network culture. He is founder/director of Queer.Archive.Work, a non-profit community reading room, publishing studio, and project space, and Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Related event: Artist talk with Paul Soulellis & launch of URGENTCRAFT: Tuesday, February 9, 2021, at 18:00 Leipzig / 19:00 Athens, online