www.brokenarchive.org

Series of Disappearences

2017

Essays, texts and images

The Series of Disappearances deals with the relocations of knowledge and libraries at different levels by following the traces of private libraries of intellectuals, writers, publishers and individuals and the traces of the book archives of collectors and institutions. It also observes the phenomena of public and street-libraries in the East Mediterranean and North Africa. The term disappearance is understood, not only in the sense of vanishing of books or libraries, but also of disappearance as a process of transformation and therefore as a mode or strategy for a new appearance. Hence, the disappearance became an act that motivates us to research its reasons, forms and the new relations that came out of it. In other words, how a publication appears in new forms and contexts and what significance does this process have in the present.

beirut, cairo, censorship, libraries, publishing, oral history, traffic of goods, mediterranean

Fehras Publishing Practices

Fehras Publishing Practices (Kenan Darwich, Omar Nicolas, Sami Rustom) is an artist collective and a publishing house established in Berlin in 2015. It was founded as a response to mounting questions concerning the history and the presence of art and publishing in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the diaspora. The mission of Fehras is to research the issue of publishing as a subject by observing and experimenting with its forms, attempting in this way to create a new, more extensive culture of critical engagement. The research focus of Fehras is based on the interrelation between cultures and publishing, which includes different fields of languages, archives, and arts. The projects, publications, and activities of Fehras Publishing Practices focus on archival materials (such as journalistic, radio, television, cinema, and digital archives), books, and magazines, libraries and readings, sound materials, publishing practices within the field of performance and visual arts and the transformation of cultural language in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.

Fehras_Publishing_Practices, When the Library was Stolen, 2017

Series of Disappearances