On Friday 24th, The Month of Books opens with Scaling Without Squeezing: a public workshopping with artist Kathrin Böhm, artist-educator Mick Wilson, and PUBLICS’ artistic director Paul O’Neill. Taking place as part of the editorial phase of their comprehensive publication exploring and profiling the ongoing practice of Böhm. The workshop makes public an extensive editorial process for the book (Sternberg, 2022); a hybrid between a critical reader and artist book, exploring the trajectory of a ‘social practice’. In 2021, Kathrin Böhm brought the physical remains of her entire artworks to The Showroom for the collaborative exhibition COMPOST, currenty on show in London. In-the-making for many years, COMPOST is a desire to resist production. Instead, to set in motion a deep process of reflection on what to do next: what to continue, what to leave behind from our entangled interdependences. The workshop will leave textual traces on the walls for further composting behind as part of the exhibition at PUBLICS. The workshop will be followed by the book launch of Public Enquiries Park Lek and the Scandinavian Social Turn with artist Kerstin Bergendal and Mick Wilson.
The Month of Books continues with a selection of exhibited works and a editorial workshop with OEI, a Stockholm based magazine for extra-disciplinary spaces and de-disciplinizing moments. OEI has published 91 issues and the accompanying publishing structure OEI editör has released some hundred titles of investigative poetry, aesthetic documents, bookworks, theoretical and poetological essays.
At PUBLICS, OEI presents staying with editing & localizing publishing – a micro-environment or a ‘grove’ of editing, a small multi-direction space consisting of three “publishing tables” and three “editing placards.” These “editing placards” in plexiglass are printed with edited constellations of verbal and visual reflections and statements – from poetological remarks on montage to theoretical soundings of geological and cultural forms of layering; from images and one-liners to more elaborated paragraphs, deriving from editorial texts or different participants works in OEI issues.
The opening coincides with the Helsinki release of OEI #90-91: Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968-1983, guest edited by Sezgin Boynik from Rab-Rab. On Saturday 25th OEI editors Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg host a workshop and presentation on editing, montage, and publishing practices versus fieldwork, historiography, and locality.
OEI presentation is realised with support from Nordic Culture Point and we want to also thank Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.