Straight Pins, Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Abstract

THE CUBAN POST-SOVIET ARTISTS' BOOKMatanzas's Ediciones Vigía and Holguin's Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists' books -that is, books that are art unto themselves -and books as 'archives'. Here, I understand the 'book' as 'archive' in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets 'archival art': that is, art, in this case book art, that 'draws on informal archives but produces them as well' in an effort 'to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present'. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s 'archival book' incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an 'archival' product.

Latin American politics underground: Networks, rhizomes and resistance in cartonera publishing

“…When we arrived there for our fieldwork in 2017, he rushed us to the Hispano-American Library to show us the cardboard books by the Cuban publisher Editorial Vigía that had been left as a donation after the 1996 edition of Guadalajara’s huge Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL), at which Cuba was a special guest. These books, made in precarious circumstances with ephemeral materials (Gordon-Burroughs, 2017), were an important precursor for Guadalajara-based publishers like Viento Cartonero.…”

Locating Design Exchanges in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…80 Similarly, few works have explored communist and socialist Latin American and the Caribbean from a design historical viewpoint. 81 Guided by the decolonial principles discussed, we wish that further scholarship readdresses oppressive attitudes in design practice and discourse, and enables other worlds to co-exist in pluriversality. By foregrounding the Latin American and Caribbean experiences and proposing a re-writing of their design history we hope this might serve as a methodological orientation for further endeavours.…”