CAIROGRAPHY COLLECTIVE presents
PRICKS #2 - TOUCHING PUBLICATION
An alternative conference on independent publishing in pandemic time

For this alternative conference at Kunsthal Gent, Cairography Collective, Sarma/Oral Site and HaRaKa, three organisations with a collaborative history in various forms of publishing, join forces to make the different agenda's tangible behind recent publication projects, their formats, concerns and outcome.

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic was announced as a rupture to our epistemologies, social lives, artistic practices, and research work, we were struck by the speed of catastrophe(s) and systems that enact them. From colonial encroachment to totalitarian technological tools taking over our bodies under the guise of pandemic control. Performance artists created radio plays, choreographers danced on TikTok, and conferences moved to Zoom. The technological shift that happened to artistic practice and performance challenges the foundations of the reflection on art and curatorial practices. However, this shift that is seemingly nascent has taken over many geopolitical regions outside of Europe and the US decades before Covid-19. Living under colonial rule, or within states of exception and emergency, artists, and cultural workers in places like Palestine, Egypt, or Syria have always explored alternative possibilities of being somewhere, and of being elsewhere. Both in creating solutions for radical practice to exist outside of the habitual institutional settings, and equally to explore the production of knowledge and specifically of publishing away from the commonly trodden paths.

This edition of PRICKS, Touching Publication, looks at acts of independent publishing and alternative institutional setups that echo with the institutional, social and epistemological rupture that we witness today because of the pandemic. PRICKS is an alternative conference that travels within different artistic and academic settings, carving out spaces for urgent conversation. Radical thinking is supported, unfinished papers are welcome, and stuttering panels are de rigueur.

PRICKS #2 -Touching Publication brings together Maha Mamoun, Adam Kucharski, Reem Shadid, Ahmed Naji, Sana Gobbeh, Enkidu Khaled, Mariana Karkoutly, Myriam Van Imschoot, Ismail Fayed, Adham Hafez and others, and will explore questions of independent publishing, commons and urbanities, digital resistance and alternative art economies, and new institutions for the arts.

To attend the conference, please register via the link at the top.