Artist-run publishing

The BARN Core Team started a publishing channel of texts on artist-run initiatives, networks, scenes & logics. If you have something to contribute - a text, a link, a reflection from your own initiative - get in touch. This collection of publications is only as good as what the Network puts into it. We should print it some time, working title: Other Earth! 

Other Earth

We imagine this library of artist-run publishing as a growing space for reflections, reportages, reports, statements, interviews, essays. Coming from the artist-run scene in Brussels and beyond, and sometimes from further out still, the contributions speak to how we organise, share, and survive together. Some of it will come from within the Brussels Artist-Run Network; some of it are things we’ve found and want to pass on. 

In our age of rampant neoliberalism, we witness a gradual disappearance of publication channels that bring together thematic, independent writing. Magazines are discontinued because they can’t end meet, blogs are a thing of the 2010s since we ’all’ contribute freely to convenient social media with polished content and centralised visibility, and forums are great but not likely to take back what big tech brings to the market smoothly, seemingly for free, and repressing anything that doesn’t please their business plans. In other words, we think the time is ripe for a free and independent publishing channel of our own, about the artist-run scene, following our own logic: such a project will be richest and most sustainable when the network can do the work, propelled and edited by the BARN Core Team.

Other Earth is a reference to Mother Earth, the anarchist magazine from the early 1900s edited by Emma Goldman. She was one of the great cool early feminists, an outstanding orator, and very quotable at that. If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.