Defining Terms: The Piracy Project

Recently, I attended an event at Grand Union, responding to their then exhibition by AND Publishing: The Piracy Project. Hosted by AND Publishing artists Eva Weinmayr and Andrea Francke, and accompanied by Karen Di Franco (archivist and curator at the CHELSEA Space) the purpose of this workshop/event was to extract the modes of distribution, appropriation and relation to the source from a number of chosen books from the piracy project and in doing so generate a means for categorization for the whole collection.

Libraries along with museums and galleries have the power to present the history and heritage of their communities. Categorization is how we navigate libraries, but these categories become institutionalised, framing our perceptions of knowledge and how culture is organised. How can we begin to create a method for categorization when it is already embedded within culture?

The books in the Piracy Project are very complex, so we began with three sub-headings: 1. METHOD OF APPROPRIATION 2. RELATION TO THE SOURCE 3. METHOD OF DISTRIBUTION the group then came up with many phrases and terms to define individual books.

There was the realization that we had generated too many terms to create a method of categorization, so the next stage was to narrow these down further or get rid of superfluous language. We were unable to narrow these down completely within the time frame but what AND Publishing has begun is a method of gaining greater understanding of pirated and artist books and are therefore able to give them greater identity.

My review of the exhibition and more information can be found on Droste Effect Magazine