Speaking volumes

Sharing is caring

Making ongoing things public

image descriptions for screen readers and poetry lovers

The title “making ongoing things public” is surrounded by companion words: I’m talking about research propositions that are ongoing, raw, unfinished, vulnerable, urgent. Sharing them allows for a more collective dimension in the research, questionning its accessibility and openness. This page itself is a rather raw proposition, made to be shared and discussed.

hybrid publishing
in a zine spirit

Under the title “hybrid publishing in a zine spirit”, you can find different forms of publishing I tested as part of this research: from paper booklets to digital pages, oral presentations, radio broadcasts, facsimilés, videos, shelves with objects, earrings, gloves, mirrors, bookends, cushions, a carpet and QR codes and url paper strips as portals to the cyberspace… Empowering research tools to learn, love, think and share.

(a presentation is
already a publication)

Before becoming one of the most famous feminists books, Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” was a lecture she gave in one of the earliest universities for women in Europe. She later published it with the printing press she had in her own house with her husband. The cover of the book, designed by her sister in law Vanessa Bell, has a very hand-made look, with wobbly letters and illustration, printed in one color, dark blue, very zine-style! The title, a room of one’s own, is drawn in lowercase letters, and the rather minimal drawing or painting represents elements from a domestic space, in a sort of rounded alcove with a dark background, that could be a door, or a glass bell jar. The alcove stands on top of a decorative pattern that ressembles embroided ornamental mats. Inside, two blank rectangles form a sort of stair-like pedestal for a squared clock. It is five past eleven. This is a very long description and a super interesting “deep looking” exercise in which a lot of contextual elements can emerge and speak to us. I’m so thankful that alt-text invited me to spend time in this image.

custom publication
(one copy) for a special occasion

In a zine spirit, a publication can be as simple as a few photocopied pages, cut and folded, made for a specific oaccasion. In this case, the yellow-paper covered booklet “Speaking Volumes Access·ories” is accompagnied by a collar chain-styled text:

“This copy can be reached at 20-50cm from the floor, requiring the body to bend to catch it between two fingers or other body parts or accessories. It can be read sitted on cushions on the floor, for those who can access this position. Other displays are available in the room and in the cyberspace. It can later circulate in other contexts, sit at other heights, connect with other bodies.”

The special occasion: an installation at the SLARG Research Week 2024, with higher and lower tables of different heights, made of yellow and blue see-through plexiglas, cut in rounded shapes. On the tables are bookends for soft and messy bindings, holding a plastified article entitled “Multiscripts, Blended Type Family Stories”, Armenian keyboard alphabet clip-on nail art, and in the blurry background, the comic book “The Earring question” as well as copies of the yellow-cover booklet on access·ories.

Testing things in
(different) contexts
thinking with the context

This slideshow presents different publications that are contributions to existing and collective contexts, such as the website of Printed Matter in New York. Printed Matter is one of the first artists’ books shop, existing since 1976, and it has a very nice tool to make selections of books: digital tables, seen from above, on which publications covers appear in quite an organic way, dropped on the table sometimes on top of each other, sometimes in a messy way, like on a real physical table. It even has optional objects like a plant, an apple, a pencil. Each table has a title and can be accompagnied by a text. I was invited to use this space at the occasion of the presentation of a book I designed and edited entitled “Copy This Book”, a subversive artist’s guide to copyright, and I took this opportunity to highlight publishing practices that challenge the capitalist, colonialist and patriarcal notion of authorship. — Read the “Copy This Table” text here.

These two screenshots of social media posts, or more precisely “stories” (a word I like), share pictures made by the audience of two talks I gave in different contexts. Each contexts informed the way I presented the content, and sometimes I even created the content for the context, it actually happens to me a lot. In the case of the Exemplaires Biennial — organised by an art school in France and with a mainly student audience, I felt the need to challenge the “exemplary” title, and rather talk about nasty practices, inspired by recent students’ movements against structural sexism and racism in art schools. I did a talk entitled Trigger Warning: Artists’ Books, sharing difficult experiences I had in the field of research on artists’ books that were bothering and itching me. I got an immense amount of heartwarming feedback from the students, who felt deep connection through shared vulnerability. — Read the “Copy This Table” text here.

The web allows to share sound and moving images, making space for bodies to appear, movements and voices to express themselves and contents to be accessed in other ways and with different senses.

A portal to the cyberspace in the form of a snake-shaped paper strip, with the url of the current page printed on it. The cyberspace is a great place to publish research in progress. Because it is malleable, successive versions can be published and modified. Its existence as documentation in an open-source approach creates a parallel space, an anti-validist one and anti-FOMO, for those who cannot join but wish they could have.

“Speaking objects”

Shelf inspired by the presentation of the book “The Boy Who Always Looked Up” by artist Ryan Gander, designed and illustrated by Sara De Bondt, on a very high shelf inaccessible to human beings, even the tallest ones. Ryan Gander is an artist moving in a wheelchair. The shelf I made is cut in transparent yellow plexiglas, through which we can see the backcover of a booklet that says: Who can read this? Who can reach this? Two dark blue hands are holding it, on elooks like a glove and the other is tentacular. On the shelf are engraved the names of Ryan Gander, Sara De Bondt and Shannon Finnegan, a very inspiring crip artist who made benches on which she wrote “This exhibition asked me to stand too long. Sit if you agree”.

Good questions: Who can read this? Who can reach this? The interrogation marks have a heart shape.

When we lasercut the plexiglas shelf presented before with Lara Dautun and Juliana Vargas Zapata, we had quite some leftover, and we figured we could use them to make earrings to wear our emo-critical punctuation signs, which embraces subjectivity and celebrate complex feelings and concerns.

Earrings and emo punctuation project in collaboration with Lara Dautun and Juliana Vargas Zapata. Read the comic book published in Phylactères art journal here.

(propositions rather than absolutes)

sharing ♥ documents
facsimilés & bootlegs

A yellow flyer with the text “Speaking Volumes: Women’s Artists Books”
Opening June 3 - June 21
– What does that mean ?
– It means books that say something
Organized by Lucy R. Lippard with lots of help Come + read
A.I.R. Gallery 97 Wooster St NYC. A graphic object that allowed me to identify both a blind spot in the narratives around artists books and offered a clue on how to expand its perspective. In the research I followed the invitation that this piece of paper has come to represent for me: exploring forms that are at the crossroads of design and art (an invitation card for an exhibition); that challenge the notion of publication (it is multiplied to be circulated); that are both self-standing but also in attachment (this piece of paper refers to an exhibition, a space, a community); that circulate easily, that are made to transmit, with a certain urgency (come and read); discrete forms that deserve more attention (ephemera, made to be thrown away)…

Making and sharing facsimilés is a practice I started working with when doing projects with queer and feminist posters and publications in Belgian archives with Just For The Record. Because of their relative simplicity and economy of means, they were super easy to replicate, which was a very joyful practice to celebrate these objects and their history, as we first had the feeling that these documents never left their dusty boxes. It is still a way for me to connect past and present dimensions (re·activation in new contexts, re·circulation), and to let documents speak for themselves. — Gloria Anzaldúa, Speaking in Tongues, two editions

(Because of my background?) The visual has a huge importance in this research. Documents I met are important for their contents and their form. I worked a lot with visual description, as a method to look at objects in details, getting closer to them. Image description is also an important accessibility tool, and specially on the web, where you can embed image description in the code calling an image, so that screen readers can read it out loud for people who need it. It is also a practice of transformation and translation, which I also worked on. One of my fav text, The Drag Queen in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction uses science fiction
tools, imagining an exhibition in 2189 on the prints
of social movements in the 1989s “presenting
flourescent-lit lineup of photocopy machines, from
the era when anybody could push a photocopy
button, and if they had the knack, engage a
readership.” In their zines, “drag queens are the
leaders, the shapers of opinions, the expert
analysts. […] Mistresses of illusion, always
forefront is the irony, the possible falsehood, of
everything they pose.” — The Drag Queen in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Mark Leger, 1989)

A purple paper booklet with the title Agrafes et bouts de ficelles printed in black, on top of a plastic envelope containing other superposed formats printed with different colors on yellow, salmon and white colored papers

better rough than sorry
screenshots, etc ♥

Here is an example of how I worked with facsimiles. Today we find the article The Drag Queen in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on digitization platforms, with many information, and a machine-readable text transcription. — Reverse Engineering The Drag Queen in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

But at first, the automatic caracter regognition tool on the platform generated an unreadable text, and more importantly, impossible to search for. These tools ar optimized for “straight” layouts, and this one was tilted, too queer for the software! — Reverse Engineering The Drag Queen in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Sharing research tools
in progress

Such encounters with objects and stories made me want to develop a tool for me to easily store them, even if they weren’t yet articulated in a precise form, not recognizable as a publication, but feeling more like fragments, gossip. I wanted this tool to be very visual. Like when you open a box of things, or a drawer. — https://speakingvolumes.space/stories

I made them searchable by keywords, great portals and binding elements. — https://speakingvolumes.space/stories

open (source)
transparency ↭ opacity
gradient approach

Image of my laptop’s research folder, entitled PHD OMG.

A portal to the cyberspace, towards audio description and guided fabulation.

fabulation in progress
🔮