The syllabus «Teaching the Radical Catalogue» is a means to create a support structure that hosts and connects a range of initiatives, users, and institutions invested in the three de-words: processes of de-universalizing, de-colonizing and de-patriarchalizing. For full references and hyperlinks, please visit the online syllabus: syllabus.radicalcatalogue.net.
In contact with
Bibliothek Wyborada, a women’s library and Fonothek founded in 1986 in St.Gallen, for their investigation of Sitterwerk’s Kunstbibliothek from a feminist perspective. During a one-week workshop Wyborada and affiliates (Karin Bühler, Marina Schütz, Ruth Erat and Sibylle Omlin) discussed and debated the need for a feminist, nonhierarchical library catalogue and for a new approach to keywords and search vocabularies. See the video «Mein ABC ist feministisch. Eine Intervention der Frauenbibliothek Wyborada in der Kunstbibliothek Sitterwerk» (2021) documenting this intervention and the reports resulting from it, «Wyborada Editionen 1-18» (2021).
Constant, a Brussels-based space for arts, media, and technology with a 20-year history in critical feminist and collective practice who organized and hosted «Unbound Libraries», a one-week work session (June 2020). Different groups, artists, publishers, designers, scholars, and activists worked together on a range of questions: What strategies can we invent to act upon omissions, essentialisms, generalizations, and stereotypes in categorization systems? Can we think of a federation of libraries on the basis of other criteria than uniformity and sameness? How can we open up collections to the multiple forms of knowledge transfers related to orality, situated objects, physical embodiment, self-published objects, videos? What can we learn from the promise of digital formats to go beyond pages, page numbers and index systems that are bound to the single book only?
Also initiated by Constant is «DiVersions» (2016), an artistic research project that is engaged with the potential of online cultural heritage. In dialogue with cultural institutions and their digitized collections DiVersions experiments with digital heritage, databases, metadata, catalogues and digital infrastructures to welcome various forms of collaboration, allowing conflicts to show up, and make space for other narratives. We further recommend the «Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01», in the documentation of Constant’s work session «Are you being Served?» (2014).
Silvia Rivera Cusiquanci, Bolivian activist and theorist, and her astute observations related to her time as researcher at Columbia University library. «A Stroll through the Colonial Library» (2011) touches on several fundamental issues that I often forget when thinking about libraries: the implicit privileging of written knowledge in the library that privileges writing over oral and performative bodies of knowledge that are rooted in daily life and communal practice. The appropriation of written knowledge that could be termed a form of intellectual colonialism and last, not least, the required privilege of a valid key card to be able to enter the library’s gates. The need of an institutional affiliation – a requirement that bars a wide range of the population from accessing these resources.
«Creating Commons» (2017–19), a research project by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder at ZhdK that asks how new forms of organization and collaboration can bring forth different kinds of cultural works and social relations.
«Cyberfeminist Index», a crowdsourced index of cyberfeminist projects asking how to include different perspectives without appropriating them. How to create a collection of literature which allows for a range of diverging and potentially conflicting historical accounts?
Heleen Debeuckelaere’s «Decolonizing is a Verb», a guided decolonial tour through the catalogue of Muntpunt, the Flemish Public Library in Brussels, as part of the «Unbound Libraries work session» organized by Constant (see above) and with Lise Vanderpiete’s organizing of a «Decolonizing Trajectory» at Muntpunt in Brussels.
Emily Drabinski who talks in «People don’t think of information retrieval as a political project» (2021) to Lucie Kolb and Eva Weinmayr about her critical cataloguing and library instruction; and with Emily’s text «Teaching the Radical Catalog» (2008) that keeps triggering thoughts, conversations and ultimately kickstarted the idea to the syllabus project.
the Feminist Search Tools group, who talks to us in «Intersectional Search – addressing ones own complicities» about their work on developing tools, platforms, and conversations on what intersectional search could be. Feminist Search Tools workgroup is a long-term collaboration between two collectives: Read-in and Hackers & Designers. (FST participants at time of publication are: Svenja Engels, Annette Krauss, Laura Pardo (Read-in), Anja Groten (Hackers & Designers); Ola Hassanain; Aggeliki Diakrousi and Alice Strete. Earlier FST participants were: André Fincato, James Bryan Graves, Heerko van de Kooij (H&D); Ying Que (Read-in).
Infrastructural Manoeuvres, a project initiated by Anita Burato and Martino Morandi at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut Library in Amsterdam that instigates a practical discussion about the division between librarian and non-librarian, service provider and service user. Infrastructural Manoeuvres turn these normative roles upside down by making the library catalogue more porous. They invite the reader to engage with a prototype of a library catalogue interface that for each book record offers four types of operation: MODIFICATION, ADDITION, REMOVAL and BUT. These operations are not automated one-click solutions, instead, they raise an issue and start a conversation about an existing element in the library record. These discussions on keywords, subject headings and authorities are made visible on the platform, and lead to workshops and pedagogical interventions that open up to students a political sense of being able to question the structure and politics of naming and framing – in the library catalogue and beyond. Visit the audio-annotated library catalogue interface «Excerpts from a conversation» (2021) a conversation between Anita, Martino, Eva, and Lucie.
Kinokophone (Amanda Belantara) and the audio piece «Catalogers at Work: Sounding the Radical Catalog» (2019, in collaboration with Emily Drabinski), which serves as an experimental teaching tool for library instruction.
Library of Inclusions and Omissions, a Reading Room, initiated by Eva Weinmayr that hosts a community collection of feminist, queer and decolonial material that is still missing in our established libraries and databases, does not conform with the canon of Western, white, patriarchal academia, mainstream publishing, or is marginalized for other reasons.
Maria Galindo and Mujeres Creando’s feminist methodologies of rewriting. Using the lens of anarcho-indigenous feminisms they rewrote the Bolivian constitution by employing three concrete voices: indigenous women, sexworkers, and lesbians – voices, as they claim, that have been left out once again of the constitutional text.
Susan Leigh Star’s essay «Ethnography of Infrastructure» (1999) where she outlines how maintenance and management are constantly working to make infrastructures invisible. Infrastructure works at its best when it has become invisible. In order to talk about infrastructure, it is necessary to
look at the forces working in the background and to render them visible. See also Constant above.
Shannon Mattern for both her research into «Library as Infrastructure» (2014) and her inspiring syllabus «Data Archive Infrastructure» (2018–19), which looked at the past, present, and future of our archives, libraries, and data repositories, and considered what logics, politics, audiences, contents, aesthetics, physical forms, etc., define them. The syllabus details all the intricacies of coordinating and organizing needed for a good teaching and learning experience.
Mont Pélerin Rewrite (2020), a workshop by Johannes Bruder, Orit Halpern, Karolina Sobecka as part of the Anthropocene Curriculum at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The workshop is dedicated to the reinterpretation of the contentious Article VI of the Paris Climate Agreement that outlines the rules on how countries can reduce their emissions using international carbon markets.
Elodie Mugrefya and Femke Snelting transitioning in and out of Constant, a space for art and technology based in Brussels. Interrogating technology from a feminist perspective, and making technologies visible and addressable they talk in the video conversation «From Feminist to Intersectional Infrastructures» (2021), about Constant’s critical shift (and its consequences) from feminist to intersectional practices and technologies – acknowledging intersecting axes of oppression. See also Constant above.
Hope Olson’s book «The Power to Name» (2002) that revealed the structural violence of classification. Reading Olson’s feminist perspective, we made two main discoveries: those with the privilege to name hold the power to construct others’ perceptions and realities; and a library catalogue is a socially constructed artefact which carries all the biases and prejudices of the people constructing it. Ultimately, we learned from Olson, the library catalogue, perceived to be a tool, is a meaning-making architecture in itself.
the Piracy Project, a collaboration between Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr exploring the philosophical, legal, and social implications of cultural piracy. Temporary reading rooms with more than 100 copied, emulated, appropriated and modified books from across the world, workshops, lectures, discussions, and debates are the means by which the Piracy Project challenges dominant understandings of authorship and ownership.
«Pirate Care Syllabus» (2020), a collectively sourced syllabus initiated by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak that aims to intervene into the crisis of care and maps practices experimenting with self-organization, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies, and knowledges at the intersection of care and piracy.
«Publishing as instituent practice» (2020), a reader edited by Rebekka Kiesewetter and Lucie Kolb that brings together texts on intersectional strategies how to intervene in the field of academic publishing. The reader highlights the act of annotating as a form of publishing and asks: «Can annotating become a ground for more intimate and less alienated ways of relating with different knowledges and agencies across time, geographies and the contested boundaries of contemporary academia, a part of a collective and relational publishing practice?»
The Rewrite (Johannes Bruder, Karolina Sobecka, Lucie Kolb, Solveig Suess), with whom we talk in the video «Rewrite. Imagining different grammars» (2021) about their work towards prototyping an annotation tool that fosters learning, dialogue and action on urgent global challenges.
Nora Schmidt’s research «The Privilege to Select» (2020) which investigates the limiting function of libraries and their search catalogues in the Global North – a topic that does not seem to have received much attention to date. We were curious to discuss these blind spots with Nora and to think together how day-to-day processes and habits in libraries could be changed in the video «Coloniality – it’s just really everywhere» (2021).
David Senior’s text «Infinite Hospitality» (2008) telling us about alternatives to hierarchical classification systems of the West such as the widespread Dewey Decimal Classification or the Library of Congress Classification. David introduces us to a non-hierarchical, faceted, so-called «Colon Classification» that S. R. Ranganathan, a librarian and mathematician from India, published in «The Five Laws of Library Science» (1928/31), and that is still in use in India today.
Sitterwerk’s event series «Finders, Keepers: Search» (2020-21) that explores practices of searching and finding and questions the socially and historically produced orders and hierarchies of the catalogue; and with the workshop series «Kunst Produktion Sprache» (2021) that seeks a shared language between the Kunstgiesserei, Kunstbibliothek and Werkstoffarchiv at Sitterwerk that cross-links the processes of production with the book and material collections and makes the on-site knowledge accessible.
«Syllabi by Artists» (2021), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, who, by «exhibiting» a syllabus as a work of art, proposes a shift from individual artists expressing themselves towards a collective endeavour of thinking and learning together.
«Unbuilding Infrastructure» (2021), an annotated bibliography by Susannah Haslam and Tom Clark’s that states that infrastructure must be geared towards being repeatable – with repetition as its aim.
some ideas in «The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study» (2013) by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten showing that studies are an ongoing mode of thinking with others and the spontaneous sociality of lived experience.
Eva Weinmayr’s text «The Power to Name and Frame» (2021) that forms part of the «Unbound Libraries» documentation (above) in which Eva takes us on a little passage reflecting on sameness and difference, structural hierarchies, a caged antelope, and Melvil Dewey’s obsession with «confusion»; and with Eva’s artistic research «Noun to Verb» (2020) in which she explores the social and political agency of publishing by investigating the micro-politics of making and sharing knowledges from an intersectional feminist perspective.