Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America

by Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Patrick O'Hare

Overview

2023 LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

The first comprehensive study of cartonera, a vibrant publishing phenomenon born in Latin America.

A publishing phenomenon and artistic project, cartonera was born in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. Infused with a rebellious spirit, it has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of publishers across Latin America and Europe making colorful, low-cost books out of cardboard salvaged from the street. Taking Form, Making Worlds is the first comprehensive study of cartonera. Drawing on interdisciplinary research conducted across Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, the authors show how this hands-on practice has fostered a politically engaged network of writers, artists, and readers. More than a social movement, cartonera uses texts, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions to foster community and engagement through open-ended forms that are at once artistic and social. For various groups including waste-pickers, Indigenous communities, rural children, and imprisoned women, cartonera provides a platform for unique stories and sparks collaborations that bring the walls of the “lettered city” tumbling down. In contexts of stigma and exclusion, cartonera collectives give form to a decolonial aesthetics of resistance, making possible a space of creative experimentation through which plural worlds can be brought to life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477324981
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	49 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lucy Bell is a senior lecturer in Spanish and translation studies at the University of Surrey.

Alexander Ungprateeb Flynn is an assistant professor of anthropology and contemporary art at UCLA.

Patrick O’Hare is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of St. Andrews.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Histories: Tracing Trajectories of Resistance

2. Methods: Trans-Formal Research for Transformational Practice

3. Texts: Cartonera Literature in Action

4. Encounters: Existence as Resistance and Sites of Plurality

5. Workshops: Cardboard and the Material Sociality of Practice

6. Exhibitions: An Artistic Proposition to Reorder the Social

Conclusion

Works Cited

About the Authors

Index

What People are Saying About This

Tim Ingold

Imagine an academic library whose books, in an act of defiance, run riot, escaping their covers and spilling out their contents far and wide. Imagine all the cardboard, lying abandoned, having been emptied of the consumer goods it once contained. And imagine the joy of all the people who could never afford the goods or enter the academy, when they discover that by stitching fugitive words with salvaged cardboard, they could give new life to both. Welcome to cartonera! In this impeccably crafted study, Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O’Hare show how the collective practice of cartonera not only crosses the frontier between art and literature, but also has the potential to turn the stuffy world of letters upside down.

Marcy Schwartz

Bell, Ungprateeb Flynn, and O’Hare’s compelling interdisciplinary approach to the cartonera publishing phenomenon in Latin America brilliantly enmeshes process, product, and context. Their 'transformal' methodology threads together fieldwork, bookmaking, and interartistic 'encounters' in Brazil and Mexico, launching an original and powerful collective project. Taking Form, Making Worlds invites readers into the cartonera groups’ hands-on aesthetic practice, into their literary corpus, and into their local settings, with nuanced and sensitive analysis. The authors go beyond research and writing to become activists and advocates as they intervene in grassroots urban arts and literature collectives’ minoritarian social and political organizing.

Lisette Lagnado

If handmade books don't immediately come to mind when thinking of 'objects of resistance' capable of breaking down prejudices and overturning the canon, they will after reading Taking Form, Making Worlds, a book about books. The authors beautifully recount stories of individuals who form collective bodies as they publish through the cartonera movement. A strategic reorganization of the systems of production and consumption turns into a lesson in everyday political practices, and we learn that separating an artistic project from its public function is a vain attempt to perpetuate the old dichotomies.

Editorial Reviews

Imagine an academic library whose books, in an act of defiance, run riot, escaping their covers and spilling out their contents far and wide. Imagine all the cardboard, lying abandoned, having been emptied of the consumer goods it once contained. And imagine the joy of all the people who could never afford the goods or enter the academy, when they discover that by stitching fugitive words with salvaged cardboard, they could give new life to both. Welcome to cartonera! In this impeccably crafted study, Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O’Hare show how the collective practice of cartonera not only crosses the frontier between art and literature, but also has the potential to turn the stuffy world of letters upside down.

— Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, author of Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

Bell, Ungprateeb Flynn, and O’Hare’s compelling interdisciplinary approach to the cartonera publishing phenomenon in Latin America brilliantly enmeshes process, product, and context. Their 'transformal' methodology threads together fieldwork, bookmaking, and interartistic 'encounters' in Brazil and Mexico, launching an original and powerful collective project. Taking Form, Making Worlds invites readers into the cartonera groups’ hands-on aesthetic practice, into their literary corpus, and into their local settings, with nuanced and sensitive analysis. The authors go beyond research and writing to become activists and advocates as they intervene in grassroots urban arts and literature collectives’ minoritarian social and political organizing.

— Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers University, author of Public Pages: Reading along the Latin American Landscape

If handmade books don't immediately come to mind when thinking of 'objects of resistance' capable of breaking down prejudices and overturning the canon, they will after reading Taking Form, Making Worlds, a book about books. The authors beautifully recount stories of individuals who form collective bodies as they publish through the cartonera movement. A strategic reorganization of the systems of production and consumption turns into a lesson in everyday political practices, and we learn that separating an artistic project from its public function is a vain attempt to perpetuate the old dichotomies.

— Lisette Lagnado, chief curator of the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, “How to Live Together" (2006) and co-curator of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2019–2020)

[Bell, Flynn and O'Hare] emphasize [cartonera publishing's] relation with decentralized grassroots organizing around the various manifestations of structural violence in Latin America based on the manifold experiences of marginalized communities such as LGBTQ, feminist, indigenous, or Zapatista movements. . . Situating cartonera publishing in this context . . . the authors resist a clear definition of the movement. Instead, they emphasise its shape-shifting character as a manifold and defiant positioning against the conditions of intersectional marginalization. . . Taking Form, Making Worlds makes an important methodological contribution by proposing and enacting more horizontal, collaborative and diverse ways of doing and representing scholarly research – while offering insights to other scholars who aim to engage in similar processes.

— Cultural Studies

[Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America] is a recommended read that folds together rich empirical material, innovative methods, original conceptualization, and a captivating narrative style.

— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

From the Publisher