An afternoon of talks and presentations by artists and publishers. ~ We’ll welcome you with drinks, a spicy soup and a Leesmap special edition quince pie by one of our collaborators ~ We look forward to celebrating with you!
We’re bringing together long-time and new publishing friends in a unique collective publication project: Leesmap. This playful and experimental publication gathers a variety of artist (maga)zines and will be distributed to a wide range of unexpected places: from hairdressers’ or dentists’ waiting room to art spaces, laundromats, libraries, and maybe even your own living room!
More information
Leesmap is inspired by the traditional Dutch ‘leesmap’—a folder with mainstream magazines, popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. ‘Leesmap’ was (and still is) a way for people to access tabloids or erotica that one would hesitate to buy in a shop. Traditionally, the magazines would be delivered in an anonymous cover and held in a nondescript folder, which would then travel from household to household. By revisiting this concept, PrintRoom’s Leesmap explores an alternative model for the distribution of artist publishing.
Leesmap #2 features a wide array of (maga)zines, each exploring a different take on popular periodicals: a women’s zine, a children’s zine, a well-being zine, a parenthood zine, a DIY zine, a pastime zine, and even a yellow pages zine!
Contributing artists and publishers include: Moosje M. Goosen & Ian Whittlesea | Loraine Furter & Moustapha Mouss Guissé | Kexin Hao, Kimberley Cosmilla, Sandy Christ & Sophie Douala | Jan Steinbach | Martín La Roche, Catarina Real & DongYoung Lee | Miek Zwamborn, Rutger Emmelkamp, Seth Crook, Bronwen Jones, Agathe Gabrielle Delaite & Nicole Martens | The Anarchist Citizenship & Kinsi Abdulleh | Hugo Rocci & José Quintanar.
The program is kindly supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL and the City of Rotterdam. Leesmap was made possible by The Cultuurfonds and Pictoright Fonds.
PrintRoom takes a break until 12 January. In the mean time, we’re finishing the next Leesmap AND we are preparing a new location for the Riso Lab and the Reading Room & shop. Stay tuned!!
On 14 December from 11.00 – 20.00 PrintRoom joins ‘Breaking even! Art Book Fair’ at the Rijksakademie.
For one day, the building will be filled with booths from more than 40 alumni, residents and special guests, showing and selling self-made publications, prints, posters, records, cassettes, and unexpected publication formats. The day includes a full programme of talks, performances, workshops and sound-based presentations.
Participants: Ali Eslami, Archie Hyde, Avril Corroon, Benjamin Li, Bram Faber, Chathuri Nissansala, Chad Cordeiro, Cole Verhoeven, Dark Editions by Danielle van Ark, DIABP (Dutch Independent Art Book Publishers), Dirk Kome, Evi Vingerling, Erik Tlaseca / crater invertido, Errant Journal ft. Roots to Fruits, Framer Framed, Fransisca Angela (Terang), Hackers & Designers, Hannah Rose Whittle, Het Generiek (Bert Scholten & Michiel Klein), it is part of an ensemble, Jeremiah Day, Josje Peters, Kagul, Lili Huston-Herterich, Learning Palestine, lisa barnard, Marijn van Kreij, Marika Asatiani, Marjo Postma, Meeting in the blue fold, Miklos Gaál, Nestor Siré, Oorbeek, PrintRoom, Raymond Cuijpers, Reading Sideways Press, Reading Vigil for Palestine, Reyhan Lál, Rijksakademie Social Practice, Ro Buur, Rooms of Now books (Maurice van Es), Self Publishers United, Set Margins’, Serge Onnen, Silke Silkeborg, Silvia Gatti, Sookoon Ang and Vincent Olinet, Taylor Le Melle, Terang (Fransisca Angela), Ton Martens, Ursula Meltzer, Ute Janssen, Varia, Weaving Realities (Aldo Esparza Ramos), Zeynep Kayan and more.
Join us for a festive gathering of unpacking and wrapping! While talking about critical friendship, introducing the new books we brought back from Tokyo, wrapping presents for our loved ones and sharing food cooked by Erika Hirose.
Unpacking Critical Friendship. And if you eat that ticket, it will bring you luck! A book presentation and conversation with Marlies van Hak, Seda Yıldız and Ruohong Wu (This Was A Project).
Books from the Tokyo Art Book Fair 2024
Wrapping Paper by Sophie Douala
More information:
Unpacking Critical Friendship Surrounded by dissension, where would we be without friends that have our back? When Ruohong Wu invited Marlies van Hak to contribute to an ongoing publishing project, a kind act of friendship, Marlies extended the invitation to Seda Yıldız. One afternoon, over a coffee, they started drawing a map tracing their exchange from the moment they met at PrintRoom in 2022.
The role of critical friend, which they both like to take on in collaborations, is one of the utterances often present in their conversations. They reflect, perform and fuel it in their collective work, through sincere and playful querying. Unpacking Critical Friendship. And if you eat that ticket, it will bring you luck! gathers project texts, references, comments, image descriptions and, luckily, many voids, in what could be an open ended attempt at archiving shared explorations, readings and relations.
Please join us for the friendly launch and bring home a postcard to send to a friend or keep as a memory!
Unpacking Critical Friendship. And if you eat that ticket, it will bring you luck! is co-published by This Was A Project (Amsterdam) and PrintRoom (Rotterdam) in an edition of 100 copies. Concept and design by Ruohong Wu, text by Marlies van Hak and Seda Yıldız. The publication was Riso printed at PrintRoom.
Books from the Tokyo Art Book Fair
To celebrate our publishing community, we’ll unpack and present the books we brought back from the Tokyo Art Book Fair, which took place from 28 November to 1 December at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. We met with lots of new and old publishing friends and look forward to sharing their work with you.
Books by our friends from: Bananafish books (CH), Loneliness books (JP), Queer Lights (JP), Asian_Food_Design (JP), nos:books (TW), Terry Bleu (NL), dmp editions (TW), Hato Press (UK), The Future Publishing (NL), Further Reading (ID), Binatang press (ID), Stay With Tuesday (CH), Shape Shifter’s Club (JP), Asia Queer Zine Library, Neutral Colors (JP), Kkmanke (KR), Related Dept. (US/CH), Building Fictions (NL), Jordan, jordan Édition (ID), The Everyday Press (UK), Corners (KR) and many more!
Top: PrintRoom table and visitors at the TABF 2024. Publications by: Benjamin Lee, Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva, Ruth van Beek, José Quintanar, This was a project, Pleasant Place, Alice Ladenburg, Erika Hiriose, Eva Posas, Johan Kleinjan, Gabriella Hirst a.o. Bottom, left to right: Stay With Tuesday (CH), Loneliness Books & Asian Queer Zine Library (JP), Bananafish Books (CH)
Wrap it Up!
On this occasion, we’ll proudly wrap your purchases with the paper which Sophie Douala designed for us during a short residency in November. It was printed by our Riso-Lab team and we think it’s so beautiful you may want to frame it 🙂
~Presentation of Rab-Rab Press books, talk by Sezgin Boynik
~Zaum-inspired musical performance by Elvin Brandhi
Join us for the 10th anniversary of Rab-Rab Press! PrintRoom will host an event celebrating Zaum, or trans-rational poetry, with a talk by publisher Sezgin Boynink followed by a performance by sound artist Elvin Brandhi. Graphic designer Bardhi Haliti will join the conversation.
For the occasion we will reprint Rab-Rab Press’s first publication Still Stealing Steel: Historical-Materialist Study of Zaum, originally published in 41 copies in Tbilisi in 2014. The publication will also include newly commissioned Zaum-inspired poems by Elvin Brandhi.
The evening will be dedicated to Ilya Zdanevich – Iliazd, who was born in 1894 in Tbilisi, and died in 1975 in Paris. He was a poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, and publisher who, through Zaum, created a new language of internationalism. Zaum (in Russian, trans-rational, or beyondsense) is seen as the most extreme manifestation of abstraction in Futurist poetry; Zdanevich defined it as the “pearl disease” in language, with the potential to destroy not only social and national barriers, but also the ones dividing humans and animals.
Rab-Rab Press’ bie bao series is dedicated to the life and work of Zdanevich-Iliazd. Beyond ‘revolution’ and ‘Zaum’, the cosmos of Iliazd also incorporated Byzantine aesthetics, theories on language sickness, modern typography, mediaeval astronomy, and visual poetry. Graphic design by Bardhi Haliti.
Rab-Rab Press books at PrintRoom: bie bao series (left) and Still Stealing Steel: Historical-Materialist Study of Zaum
More information:
Rab-Rab Press is an independent publishing platform based in Helsinki. It publishes Rab-Rab: journal of political and formal inquiries in art and books combining experimental art and leftist politics with scholarly rigour and punk attitude. Initiated in 2014, Rab-Rab Press is run by Sezgin Boynik.
Sezgin Boynik is a writer, editor and publisher based in Helsinki. He founded Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform in Helsinki that combines experimental art and leftist politics with scholarly rigour and a punk attitude. He also co-founded Pykë-Presje in Prizren, Kosovo, an independent space using archives to oppose the nation-state narratives. Boynik is also involved in the editorial work of OEI, a Stockholm based magazine dedicated to expanded poetry.
Elvin Brandhiis an improvising lyricist and beat producer instigating projects of improvised socio-aesthetic overflow expanding haphazardly with circus intent. Her practice involves performing wherever and whenever possible, composing audio-sonic essays, videos, sample-based beats and theatrical public hacking.
Bardhi Halitiis a Kosovar graphic designer and researcher living in Amsterdam. In 2011, Haliti co-founded REDO, the annual international graphic design event in Prishtina, and since 2013 he serves as its program director.
From 19:00 – 21:00 at PrintRoom Schietbaanstraat 17, Rotterdam
FLAMETTI, or the dandyism of the poor — a novel by Hugo Ball, translated and read by Catherine Schelbert
Presentation of the epic audio book adventure with audio fragments, a talk and a live musical intermezzo by FGA and Nina Hitz.
We’ll serve drinks & bites!
Catherine Schelbert’sreadingof Hugo Ball’s Flametti, or thedandyism of the poor is published as FGA#44, to celebrateFucking Good Art’s 20th anniversary, and consists of an audiobook/radio play, a read-along paperback, and 10-inch vinyl record.
This new FGA is a 6h 40min audiobook / radio play adaptation of the English translation of Hugo Ball’s 1916 novel Flametti, or the dandyism of the poor, with music in the spirit of Dada by Robert Hamelijnck, Nina Hitz, Nienke Terpsma, and also starring Vilbjørg Broch, Lucas Simonis, Klaas Hekman & Wu Wei, and Christien Coetzee (in order of appearance).
Flametti, or the dandyism of the poor is a dark satirical comedy about an impoverished vaudeville company and the rise and fall of its director Max Flametti, a figure of tragic proportions entangled in his inescapable self. It is also the story of the allure of the “Fuchsweide, the concert and entertainment quarter of the off-beat, fun-loving crowd,” which is in danger of being “cleansed” by the police. This deceptively straightforward, everyman tale eloquently renders the complex, conflicted, non-professionalized, messy, forgotten humus of a vibrant urban scene that prevailed in Zurich over a hundred years ago.
Hugo Ball wrote this provocative, largely overlooked, semi-autobiographical novel in 1916, the same year he, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and others founded Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Their artist-run nightclub existed for less than a year and gave birth to Dada as a form of artistic protest against the brutality of the First World War raging in Europe. They spread their ideas in absurd, grotesque performances, sound poetry, and manifestos. It is from this cultural and political context that the novel Flametti emerged.
Co-published by edition fink, Zurich and FGA.
Fucking Good Art is both an artist collective (Rob Hamelijnck & Nienke Terpsma) and a recurrent publication on contemporary art, which manifests physically as well as on the internet.
FGA / Nienke Terpsma (left), BAB Art Book Fest, photo Willem Mes
For the last of these summer days, PrintRoom will present works by artist publishers who celebrate plants, gardens, and gardeners. It may help you to plan your next year’s green paradise.
Gabriella Hirst and Jasper Otto Eisenecker will present the publication “Battlefield” followed by a hands-on introduction to the Battlefield garden.
Guus Kaandorp, Floor Kortman and Lou-Lou van Staaveren will present Pleasant Place, Issue 5: Mien Ruys with a short talk by contributor Nicole Martens. We’ll create our own garden design on PrintRoom’s pavement – using chalk and with Mien Ruys’ design templates in mind.
We’ll serve afternoon tea and snacks, possibly in the garden!
Battlefield is an artist book produced by artist Gabriella Hirst and designer Jasper Otto Eisenecker. It is the printed accompaniment to Gabriella’s Battlefield garden artwork- a garden of plants whose officially registered cultivar names reference theatres of war, armed conflict and the military, which she has been growing since 2014.
The publication tells the stories behind every plant in the Battlefield living garden archive, including excerpts from email correspondence with plant societies, gardening blogs, horticultural archives, plant care tips, personal anecdotes and speculations alongside compiled ephemera and research material gathered from the last decade of the garden. It features essays by curator and researcher Anja Lückenkemper and Gabriella Hirst, and a poster-dust jacket of the planting guide of Battlefield as installed at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück in 2022-23.
Pleasant Place is a growing collection of publications about the art of gardening. Pleasant Place informs and inspires by offering both practical and in-depth information as well as unexpected approaches to everyday garden tasks and garden design. Through collaborations with experts and artists Pleasant Place caters both to those who grow gardens as well as those who imagine gardens.
Pleasant Place #5 is dedicated to garden legend Mien Ruys, one of the most influential garden designers of the 20th century. This issue includes a number of outstanding contributions, among which: an introduction to Mien’s life, designs and awesomeness by garden designer and author Julia Crawford (‘Mien Ruys: Designing the Dutch garden’); a conversation with Pien van der Stadt, who worked alongside Mien Ruys for twenty years (‘A garden like mine made her completely nervous’); a guide on ‘How to create a fabulous border with Mien’s favourite plants’; a personal account by designer Bonne Reijn, who spent his earliest years with his great aunt Mie (‘Dear Mien’); ‘Kleine stadstuintjes’, the interpretation of a small urban garden’s canvas by five artists (Farida Sedoc, Sigrid Calon, Frédérique Albert-Bordenave, Nicole Martens and Vera van de Seyp); and many more!
PrintRoom joins Index Art Book Fair in Venice! An Art Book Fair of Art Book Fairs, organised by the Index Art Book Fair team at the new art space Ca’Buccari.
Index Art Book Fair members joined our first Books Are Bridges Summit in 2022 in Rotterdam which focussed on Art Book Fairs and how we can strengthen the community of artist publishing. We are very excited to continue the conversation with Art Book Fair organisers from all over the world. We’ll bring back a good selection of books from the fair to Rotterdam!
At the clubhouse of Volkstuinvereniging Streven naar Verbetering (SNV) Roel Langerakweg 33, 3041 JK Rotterdam
→ Enter through the community garden gate and stay left until you reach the clubhouse
Join our Fabulous Art Book Fest with +30 international and local artist publishers*, who present their latest publications at the Clubhouse of SNV community gardens in Rotterdam-West.
The Art Book Fest is the place for those who love artists’ publications – from books to zines, from toolkits to experimental projects. In addition to tables with the latest releases, there will be book presentations, workshops, food and music. Everyone is welcome!
Books are Bridges Program:
12.00 – 17.00 Art Book Fest – Publishers present their work in and around the club house of SNV
Bookpresentations:
13.00 -16.00 Ongoing audio book presentation: Flametti, or the dandyism of the poor, a novel by Hugo Ball, translated and read by Catherine Schelbert by FGA / edition fink
13.30 -14.30 Book presentations we are all extremophiles by David Habets &
NETbook Touched by Mushrooms by Eline Vis and PrintRoom
15.00 Book presentations Chinees-Indisch Restaurant Stickeralbum by Benjamin Li and Scanned Football Photos by Maurice van Es
Worskhops:
13.00 – 13.10 Midnight Wellness Retreat workout with Kexin Hao
13.00 – 14.00 and 15.00 – 16.00 Printing the Garden (all ages) with Ewoud van Rijn & Fraser Muggeridge
13.00 – 13.10 Midnight Wellness Retreat workout with Kexin Hao
14.00 – 15.00 Making a landscape (all ages) with José Quintanar
All afternoon:
Music by Bergur Anderson & Linus Bonduelle
Food by Eathouse
BAB Art Book Fest 2023 –
top left: book tables (during the storm), right: book presentation and tea tasting || bottom left: breakfast by Artists in Solidarity (raising money for victims of the earth quake in Turkey), right: presentation and demonstration NETbook Walton Flax Exchange, with gardeners and publishers.
12,13,14 July: The Books Are Bridges Summit
The Books Are Bridges Art Book Fest is organised within the scope of the third Books Are Bridges Summit – a small-scale gathering for artist publishers with space for connection, exchange of ideas and DIY workshops, spread across locations in Rotterdam: from the gardens to the docks.
For this edition, we invited colleague spaces for artist books and social spaces for artist publishing, next to a number of artist publishers. We bring together multiple generations of publishing spaces – from initiatives that have started in the 80s to younger spaces, amongst which are einBuch.haus (Berlin, DE), Northing Space (Bergen, NO), Lendroit (Rennes, FR), Handshake® Books (Valencia, ES), Common Imprint (Berlin, DE), Limestone Books (Maastricht, NL), Colorama (Berlin, DE) and Boekie Woekie (Amsterdam, NL).
Coming to Rotterdam from various countries in Europe by train, they all bring their unique experiences and methods of making the work of artist publishers public. During the first two days of the Summit, we’ll present, listen, have conversations on how we organise, connect, support each other and how we are in turn supported. We look at ways to involve a wider audience in our publishing projects and discuss methods to create new connections, also outside of our field.
Next to discussing these questions, presentations, shared meals and exercises, we will do a bike tour, guided by artist publisher José Quintanar. The conversations of this gathering will be made public in the publication Summit Up #3 later this year.
*With:
einBuch.haus (Berlin, DE), Northing Space (Bergen, NO), Knust Press (Nijmegen, NL), Lendroit (Rennes, FR), Colorama (Berlin, DE), Gloria Glitzer (Berlin, DE), MonoRhetorik (Den Haag, NL), Not Just a Collective (Arnhem, NL), Common Imprint (Berlin, DE), Limestone Books (Maastricht, NL), Rahel Zoller (London, UK), Teuntje Fleur (Rotterdam, NL), Hum Drum Press (Rotterdam, NL / Berlin, DE), Handshake® Books (Valencia, ES), Boekie Woekie (Amsterdam, NL), Bur-Rose (Den Haag, NL), This was a project… (Amsterdam, NL), Pleasant Place (Amsterdam, NL), PrintRoom (Rotterdam, NL), Prickly Paper (Guangzhou, CN/ Berlijn, DE), 51 Personae (Shanghai, CN), Benjamin Li (Rotterdam, NL), Maurice van Es (Rotterdam, NL), David Habets (Den Haag, NL), Fucking Good Art (Rotterdam, NL), Eleanor Vonne Brown / The Nose (Walton on the Naze, UK), Fraser Muggeridge / London, UK), Jap Sam Books (Prinsenbeek, NL), Futura Resistenza (BE), Short Pieces that Move (Rotterdam, NL), Amy Suo Wu (Rotterdam, NL), Jesse Presse with Valiz and Onomatopee, nkg publications, Errant Journal (Amsterdam, NL), The Eriskay Connection (Breda, NL), Warehouse (Amsterdam, NL), Pages (NL), a.o.
