~ Book presentation Against the Written Word
~ Live performance
by Ian F Svenonius
Celebrating the last days at PrintRoom with Alan Smart, Publisher in Residence in April, sharing some of our Archive stories and finds
27 April 2023
20:00 – 22:00 at PrintRoom
Calling all anarchists, royalty-rejectionists, and everyone else seeking an alternative to the capitalist deluge of King’s Day! Schlep your second-hand wares and revolutionary aspirations to PrintRoom, and join us for an evening programme celebrating resistance from past and present.
Artist and musician Ian F Svenonius will present his fourth and latest book AGAINST THE WRITTEN WORD. Deemed ‘the book to end all books’, this publication is the first of its kind to take a principled stance against literacy, which it describes as a ruling class conspiracy that renders workers as participants in their own oppression. Ian’s talk will include an encounter session with testimonials by former readers and a musical accompaniment from ESCAPE-ISM — the beneath-the-underground sensation that has been described as ‘an act of musical vandalism’.
New Babylon Times: Publishing in the Contested City is an exhibition by publisher-in-residence, Alan Smart. The exhibition, which evolved over the course of the residency, maps a chronology of counter-culture manifestos – including excerpts from Dadaist texts, the Situationist International, and Provo publications. This gathering of material retraces the evolution, dissonances, and interconnections between these movements, each articulating – through happenings, spatial interventions, and reimaginings of the urban sphere – a radical desire for new social and spatial paradigms.
During the month of April, a series of research excavations and communal discussions will be undertaken in institutional and more independent archives and collections, harvesting both textual material and questions, stories, and shared contemporary perspectives on the historical corpus. Some of these gleanings will be reproduced and made available in our mail-out project, Holiday in the Archive, which will also draw on PrintRoom’s visit to the Interference Archive (NY, USA) and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, NL). If you would like to receive a copy of Holiday in the Archive in the post, please send us a mail at: info@printroom.org