WITH: Éditions Burn-Août
We are a group of artists and editors grouped together in a publishing collective called Éditions Burn~Août since 2019. We work together to shape and disseminate contemporary critical, emancipatory and political thought by publishing its actors. After training in art schools, we turned to a practice of independent publishing in a form of social, political and climatic emergency.
In one of our publications, L’histoire de Semiotext(e), Sylvère Lotringer recounts her dreams to Chris Kraus and says that “Texts are less important than the meshes they produce together”. It’s these meshes that interest us, and our artistic work is above all a pretext for creating a collective force, connecting emancipatory thoughts and imagining perspectives for struggle.
We think about and invent tools for every stage in the publication of a book: from editorial direction to the production and distribution of our objects, we experiment with devices. We’re particularly interested in light, economical forms (leaflets, posters, brochures, etc.) that can be reproduced quickly, dispersed and exchanged easily.
We don’t see our publications as ends, but as means, theoretical bases for producing communities and collective knowledge. For this reason, in parallel with their production, we organize events around them, which can be readings, surveys, roundtables, workshops and so on. We draw on a variety of methodologies to design these events: we like to combine the tools of popular education with the artistic fields of performance to create moments of sharing and hospitality.
