In conjunction with the Babel Bookspace programme at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, this workshop and talk explore what happens to libraries that are vulnerable, shared and mutate.
How do individual writers, librarians and readers change each other, and in doing so become a community, in the peculiar space of a public library? What happens when those places, collections and communities disperse? And how might the act of publishing – of making public – be at the core of any answer to these questions?
The 'Me–We Library' workshop was run in collaboration with the Piet Zwart academy and invited participants to collaboratively make a set of answers to these questions. By sharing, copying, re-printing and talking we will explore ideas of loss, recovery, speculation, reproduction, anthologisation and reading.
Public libraries are having their purposes and practices fundamentally challenged by the growth of networked computing and neo-liberal models of the civic sphere. While these changes should be matters for broad social debate, it seems equally important to re-imagine what public libraries of the near future could be and could enable. The 'Speculative Libraries' talk was a public lecture that explored some of the roles that contemporary art might have in this collective process of re-imagining.
