A syllabus is a document traditionally used in educational contexts to give an overview of the content of a course.
The syllabus “Teaching the Radical Catalogue” will be developed throughout the duration of the exhibition.
This process-based approach to exhibition-making will allow us to collectively articulate questions as they emerge. This growing syllabus will serve as a means to be in conversation with practitioners, scholars, librarians, and library users on how to get to understand that the process of information retrieval is in itself a political project.
The syllabus is also a means to create a scaffolding, a structure that hosts and links a range of initiatives, users and institutions concerned with the three de-words: processes of de-universalising, de-colonising and de-patriarchalising.
The syllabus can be used by anyone spending time in or with libraries. Collectively, we will try and rewrite what feminist and de-colonial organisation of knowledge could be. Everyone is welcome, and everyone will be heard.
In contact with Shannon Mattern and her research into “Library as Infrastructure” and her detailed and inspiring syllabus “Data Archive Infrastructure”, 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 organising needed for a good teaching and learning experience;
in contact with “Syllabi by Artists”, 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;
in contact with “Pirate Care Syllabus”, 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-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges at the intersection of care and piracy;
in contact with some of the ideas in “The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study” by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten showing that studies are an ongoing mode of thinking with others and the spontaneous sociality of lived experience;
in contact with the Sitterwerk Foundation’s Kunstbibliothek and Werkstoffarchiv and their wide range of approaches that critically engage with knowledge-related practices in libraries. For example, enabling users to arrange the books on the shelves as they see fit and inviting them to leave traces in the library via annotation.
in contact with “Finders, Keepers: Search”, a series of events looking into differences in analogue and digital search cultures. The series questions the socially and historically produced orders and hierarchies of the catalogue;
in contact with “Kunst Produktion Sprache”, a workshop series seeking a shared language between the Kunstgiesserei, Kunstbibliothek and Werkstoffarchiv at Sitterwerk that crosslinks the production processes with its books and materials and makes the on-site knowledge accessible.