 Thank you, Dan and Hannah for this invitation. I'm delighted to be taking part in this series and being a part of the first conversation as part of the series with Anna and Maha. I thought I would kind of try to give us a little bit of framework to work with here before we sort of delve into a closer look at the work of Pefeta. So one thing to say here is that while this series essentially focuses on the rise of publishing in the Arab world since the 1960s, for me as someone who essentially works on publishing during the long 19th century, I thought it would be important for me at least to open today's session with a few thoughts on the shifting views about publishing and recent scholarship on this particular history in the Middle East. And I'm hoping that these few points will help us understand the importance of Pefeta's work in sort of upending many of our conceptions about publishing practices, their medium and their afterlife. So when we think of publishing, we're prone to focus on the idea that the practice is technologically and logo-centric. So what I mean by this is we tend to underscore the methods, the modes of production, the technological modes of production and really emphasize the role of modernity and industrialization and the propagation of textual production and dissemination within the public sphere. At the same time, publishing for a lot of us still evokes a very logo-centric understanding of knowledge production and circulation. An idea that, you know, one that is done via particularly via text mostly. And these views have really formed the backbone of discussions on publishing in the modern public sphere. And of course, there's centrality to issues of national identity. And here I'm evoking, of course, probably most people already know this, but I'm thinking of Benedict Anderson's views of that print capitalism or the mass production of secular text that engaged a public readership and the forces of a commercialized market fostered the emergence of national consciousness and views of a collective identity in Europe. Additionally, of course, we have Jürgen Habermas's argument that the consolidation of print commerce led to the formation of a bourgeois public sphere in which the public organized itself as the bearer of public opinion through rational critique via printed books and newspapers. But in the context of the Arab world in particular, and we can say maybe even in the non-West more broadly, there have been various scholars who called for alternate readings of local notions of publishing and even of the public. For instance, the historian Dennis Shazdi who mostly works on the 18th century, the math specifically and the Ottoman context has argued that the notion of publishing shouldn't be limited to print. Rather, one can say that any handwritten or printed text meant to be read in the public domain can be considered a public text, which would extend the notion of publication to numerous media, but also to inscriptions on buildings. So from anything from advertisements to newspapers to building inscriptions. And for me, this really recalls Kefeta's idea of making public and public making as a commitment that is nuanced in its complexity and its unfixity and one that cannot be limited to the realm of print. At the same time, we have some historians who have challenged the logocentrism of the publishing industry. So probably the one who comes to mind it right now is most recently the work of Ziyad Fahmi. Fahmi has a new book out but his older book also dealt with this topic. And basically he calls for a critical consideration of performance, orality and sound and not just text when it comes to the question of publishing and leadership. Of course, another important aspect to examine is visuality, which is one that I personally focus on in my own work on 19th century publishing practices mostly in Beidou, but now I've kind of been extending my purview to Cairo and to Egypt. In my first book, I considered the overlaps between scribal and print conventions as early articulations of Arab modernity in Beirut. And I'm currently working on a study that considers the rise of the printed image and its importance to visual and not just textual literacy at this time. But visuality has also been recently explored by other scholars such as Dayamaasri who I believe is on this call and will be participating in an upcoming installment of this series. In her Cosmopolitan radicalism, Maasri focuses on the important role that Beidou's publishing industry in the law 1960s played in its intersections with artistic practice and the growing political commitment and radicalism of the arts and of artists and designers in the face of the events of 1967. So I just wanted to kind of put that out there as sort of a bookend before we get started with looking closely at the work of Kay Fatah and Meha's work and to really be rethinking the very notion of what publishing means and its audience in the context, not just in the context of Kay Fatah's work but also it's something to keep in mind that it has been and currently is being considered in relationship to publishing in the pre 1960s. So with that, I hand this over to the both of them. Thank you, Hala and thank you, Hala and Daniel for this great invitation and thank you everyone for being with us today. Maybe I'll start by introducing myself and Ella herself and then we introduce Kay Fatah briefly. So yeah, Daniel already introduced us with you just, I'll say I'm originally a visual artist from Cairo. That's my entry into the arts. I studied previously economics and Middle Eastern history and always had an interest in photography running along but then I moved more and more into the arts. And my practice has moved on from like different mediums from photography to film to publishing as an artistic practice. And I'm based in Cairo. Maybe I'll pass on to Ella. Thank you very much for having us and we're really excited for this series. I'm a visual artist too. And I am Mahana Ay, we met an Amman when she came to research for one of the shows she was curating meeting points or co-curating but then we met again in Sharjah meeting point, March meeting, sorry. And then we met again in shows that we were invited to and we kept meeting. And as we kept meeting, we started our friendship but also this collaboration projects. So my work is mostly informed by research and the medium that I work with is also informed by the outcomes of the research or the necessities or the needs of the research that I've done. I researched a lot of industrial projects in Egypt, industrial promises as part of the Pan-Arab also project. And I also researched the political shifts and as they affect architectural projects and urban plans in Iraq and particularly in Baghdad and the way these architectural projects were exported to the region and kind of created their own regimes in the places where I live and work. And I've also worked with concepts of militarism and on the performative in political documents or how do we read the performativity in political documents or photographic documents? So yeah, this is it for now. Maybe my lunch and to do some. So when we started thinking together, so like Alek said, we met through these different exhibitions. We both were artists but also had different roles in art institutions in our cities, Alek and Amman and me and Cairo. And also like a beginning of a curatorial practice. And we felt as practitioners this the difficulty of accessing artistic work outside of the finished exhibition. So as a curator, for example, how to know of artists, how to reach those artists, how to see their latest works. It's always kind of a real effort to find who's working on what. And it's very informal. So we started thinking of, we had different ideas of creating platforms for sharing artistic work from like platforms for like sharing films of independent filmmakers and things like that. But what took off was this project like or what we actually started working on was Cairo. And the idea came in around 2012. We published our first book in 2013. And the thought was that we would like to produce a series of how-to books or books that take the format of how-to's use it as a kind of familiar vehicle, like a form that is popular and that is recognizable, but to pass through it more experimental writing. And the authors we invited came from both art and non-art backgrounds. And this was for us part of the idea. So the idea for this series was to kind of try to remove a little bit this dividing line between art producers and receivers, audiences and non-art producers and audiences. Because we thought there were like some very interesting writing or art production, not necessarily just writing, that is only known for gallery goers, or these circles. And vice versa, they're very interesting writers who are published in more public or more mainstream publishing platforms who are not necessarily engaged in the more specialized discussions or circles. So also coming from the arts, we were a little bit also, like we were not happy with the confinement or this exclusivity of art spaces and wanted to get out of this a little bit. So this was the idea to bring authors from either side of the art and non-art into one series that is takes on a popular format in terms of size and price and where it is placed. So we placed in regular bookstores and things like that. So methods of printing and final production and pricing and all of these things. What you see is the cover of our first book, How to Disappear by Heysam Luardini. And so this book came out in 2013. It mainly goes through a kind of auditory exercises or exercises that deal with sound. And through that, it's a series of exercises that relate to your subjectivity or your position in relation to a group, to a public. So it's different negotiations with self and with a general public. And it was interesting that this book was extremely popular when it came out and we always kind of feel like there was. It was a time like 2013, it was a very loud time. So in the region, it was a period of like the Arab Spring. And it was a period of like rethinking many things, protesting and really like noise. And the pressure of having a public also role or presence. For example, just being there physically on the square, things like that. So it was interesting that the book that was actually visiting this idea of looking inwards and attending to your private self had some kind of resonance at that time and like the title itself, it seems because at the time what you see now is a format, this pocket-sized format is a format that we adopted a little bit later when we first published this book, it was a little bit bigger. The name of the author was not on the cover. So it was just how to disappear, that's it. And it was interesting to see how it was became popular. Maybe I'll just go through quickly like the covers of, so you just know the range of publications, how to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands in the carpet. Was a book by Jevdett Erick, a Turkish visual artist, sound artist, he has different kind of works in different mediums. And it's basically, he goes through a process that's also meditative, but also practical, very tactile of how to imitate the sound of the shore, even if you're not next to a C just using things that you have, like your hands in the carpet. The next, yeah, you see your images from the inside of the exercises. Then came how to know what's really happening by Francis McKee. It's one of our smaller books and it's very funny, but also philosophical. And again, the title was quite resonant. I can't go into all in detail how to mend Mother Hadan's ghost by Iman Marseille, who is currently one of the most celebrated women poets in the Arab world. And in this book, she goes through, she starts from an image of her and her mother, like a photograph, the only existing image that she has of her mother. And she investigates motherhood through photography and what can be captured, what is missing and what is emphasized. But it also has different kinds of writing in it, from the diaristic to the more academic to the more poetic and reflective. How to Spell the Fight by Natasha Sabir-Hajjian. Also kind of focuses, starts from this cat's cradle game that we know from childhood to investigate like different paths of learning and different paradigms of education. Next. And these are the latest two, these ones are still not translated, one is translated into English, but will be published in this coming month. And the second is yet to be translated because of its special poetic language, needs a kind of a very special translator. So the one on the right is how to remember your dreams by Egyptian writer, Amra, is that in which she explores dreams as both the dreams that you have when you're asleep, but also your dreams of what you want to do in life and how it's kind of biographical. So how he moves from one stage to the next from having more, from a more religious grounded worldview and readings and role in society to more towards another. And as he moved forward through the revolution and everything to a more secular and a completely different set of writers who influenced him. And the one on the left is by Hussain Nasreddin, Lebanese artist and poet, it's called How to See the Palace Columns as if they were palm trees. And the last book that we just published as an e-book so far, but also will be printed this month is How to Love a Homeland by Oksana Timofiva, in which she investigates different notions of what's a homeland, what's different relationships to land. And she kind of tries to retrieve the concept of a connection to a birthplace. She tries to reappropriate it from right wing discourse to a different discourse and to kind of just re-emphasize this connection to a land and without it having fascist overtones. So this is just a quick presentation of this series, this pocket-sized series that we did and it's still ongoing. But I'll just like to say like we had two more phases in our activity as Kay Fatah and I'll hand over to Ale. But I'll just say that this is our first project, like phase of Kay Fatah, which is still ongoing, but then in 2019, we started curating exhibitions that were focused on alternative publishing practices in the region, but also with the resonances that are international. So it's not just the region, but with an emphasis on researching and presenting work from the region. And the third phase, which is also still ongoing, is an interest in publishing itself as a subject. So we started a second series of books that focus on publishing as a medium. But now I hand over to Ale for the exhibition part. So yes, in 2019 or late 2018, we were invited to curate a show for Beirut Art Center. We as independent publishers or as artists will consider publishing as part of their artistic practice over the years of trying to publish on our own or through collaborations with institutions. We were going through certain, like we were going through, of course, the life cycles of publishing, of publishers, of other publishers, but also going through obstacles ourselves, changes in law, requirements, our expectations from us as people who are producing publications. And sometimes or maybe often we were, especially at the beginning of the project, we were normally over, like we were often overshadowed by the institutional partners that we had when we were producing our books. So we were also interested in what sorts of, and the types of kinships and also parallel practices of people who were, like other artists who would be publishing or had published in the past or publishing projects that are struggling or trying to exist and cross borders or managed to print or to find a way to print whether at printers or at home or and so on. And so we used this opportunity to, or this invitation to create a show to basically put together an exhibition on independent publishing. And we were not really sure as we were curating it, what is it going to look like at the end? But we knew what we were looking for. We were looking for projects that could tell us more information about the life of a publisher, about the promise of publishing, about the publishing effort. And we ended up producing three shows, in fact, one at the Bayruta Center in July 2019 that ran for two months. And the second one was how to maneuver, shape-shifting texts and other publishing tactics, which was at Warehouse in Abu Dhabi. And that was end of 2019, beginning of 2020. And with that show, we had a budget to produce a publication. And we also figured, like we arranged the public program budget to produce a symposium on publishing. And the third iteration was in Amman under the title of the same title of the first show, how to reappear through the Coving Leaves of Independent Publishing. But in every show that we put together, we looked closely at the publishing scene in the country, or in the city, but also in the country, in the region around the place where we're showing. And we included around 50 projects or more in every show. So I'm gonna present some of the projects that we, or some of the ideas or tactics that we've utilized in these shows for a moment. So we were looking at shows, we were looking at publishing effort, or independent publishers, or authors who self-published themselves or self-publishers. And for instance, one of the examples that we were impressed with and kind of tried to present in the show is the work of, or to highlight the work of Adib Shabab, the author of the youth who is, who is an Egyptian author, writer, who had self-published his own books back in the 90s. And this is his pen name. And he used, utilized several ways of marketing. He was very good at marketing his own publications one moment. So for instance, here we see him carrying a kite that carries his pen name, that he probably flew in the skies of Cairo. And in other cases, he would fence this commission banner in which he writes the name of his latest novel next to his name and sit, or make someone sit behind the goal in a famous or a very visible soccer game. And when the players are shooting, they're shooting the ball towards the goal. He unrolls his banner and then he gets the information, seen on, or his like the information on his latest publication already advertised through whatever that is capturing that moment. We have not necessarily in this show looked at the content, particularly we were not necessarily looking or tracing what sort of, like what do we like or not like about the content that is being published as much as what sorts of, you know, visibility these four projects could have had. And so we could find or know or collect the histories of early histories or find this article or Princess Mahan knew about him because he had sprayed his, some of his banners in front or in front of at the exit of or at the entrance of or near the entrance of the AUC in Cairo, but we had not like had access to his publications themselves. And this was particularly something that was also interesting because it was not only us, probably so many people knew about him, but not necessarily have read his books. So what he managed to do is basically have his, like his advertises work, but not necessarily to know how to circulate it. And so this idea of circulation was also very important to us anyways, because we were, this was one of the ideas that we wanted to look into when we are looking into this show. And in fact, we tried to commission a research. So we tried to use some of the program budget to commission the research that looks into the feasibility of creating a distribution network for independent publishers. But this, such research or such commissions could also change or morph into other projects depending on who have received the commission. But for instance, we also looked at all these potential possibilities of bookshops who could also be our agents in the cities that we are, that we could reach to. And for instance, this is the work of a bookshop in Amman called Mahalilma or The Place of Water. And the owner of the bookshop had inherited these books, like all books like the library or the bookshop of his father kind of, and he split it between his brothers. And many of the books had already lost their covers. And in this work, he is reproducing or kind of remaking the covers for these publications. But he has the ability to do so only because he opens this bookshop 24 hours a day now, not anymore in corona time. But he would open at unusual hours for people to come and to just have access to publications when they want. So we try to bring on board to bring within our network such like efforts or such also possibilities of collaboration or presence. And meanwhile, look also at how this bookseller was trying us to make, to have his books or the books he offers for sale live longer and in interesting way. We also commissioned artists in the course of this show. So for instance, we commissioned, this is the work of Ali Ayal and the artist, young artists from Iraq who had lived between Beirut and Baghdad. And Baghdad is very well known for it being the largest Arab book market. And there's a particular state in Baghdad called the Mutanabi Street on which all sorts of bookstores are available like offers also some publications and Ali traveled to Baghdad from Beirut to look for publications that he had in mind like books that could form an image in his own, something in his own imagination. But he also had a mission to look at some papers that his mother had written. In the past particularly to Aya on the last pages of a particular magazine that had offered a place for people to write. But what he found is basically, he didn't find necessarily the books that he had imagined on the Mutanabi Street. And he had found that his mother had written like besides her diaries, she had exchanged notes with her friends on how the content of some of the publications or the poems that they read do not fit with the daily life they live in. And so he carries these like all sorts of notes, personal and exchange notes and like reproductions of some content plus like his pickings from Mutanabi Street in a blue bag from Baghdad to Beirut and he installs it on the wall in Beirut in the exhibition. And there are these drawings that are ink drawings that are enlarged experiences or enlarged notes from inside these papers. This act of moving from one, and besides of course the personal notes there are the publications and then the installation, there's an image of him installing the work but these paperwork are all swallowed by the mainstream publications. So this act of moving the books or the papers from Baghdad to Beirut again to Abu Dhabi and when they could not travel to Amman because they are already installed in Abu Dhabi, Ali had to create another work on this. This act of movement was to Ali an act of publishing itself. And this blue bag in which he carried my papers he considered it as a traveling publishing house or the publishing house itself. And when he didn't manage to show the same work simultaneously of course in Amman and Abu Dhabi he recreated or he created this an image from the drawings into the shape of a publishing house into this miniature model that cannot be accessed except with size like unless you're downsized to the size of the memories that you could carry of the content that you have read or authored or managed to retrieve from all the times. And also part of what we have produced is basically to try to make the work of other publishers visible not necessarily only to the visitors of the exhibition but also to us as publishers but also as researchers. And here we are showing the work of Simon Fatal particularly the post-Apollo press which has, Simon is an artist who had moved from Beirut to live in states near California in the late 70s. And in around 1982 her partner, Etel Adnan got a book refused to be published by another publisher and so Etel decided to publish this book and for that she registered the company called it the post-apollo press created the logo issued an ISBN and printed the publication. She thought that she would only print one publication but then in the same year she was offered like she received an expression of interest to translate the one of Etel's books into English and when and she accepted and she offered to publish this book and so on and this started a 20 year or more history of or a story of publication of publishing publishing in the experimental poetry and very particular books. What we try to do in this work for instance is that we for the first time we are showing Simon Fatal as a publisher in Beirut and we are collected all the as much as we can. I mean, maybe she had published over 76 or something publications we managed to find 71 or so and we showed them in a timeline that is intercepted by the documents of documents that are taken from her own archive from her post-apollo archive and these documents show or illustrate how she managed to be or to work on her own during all these years. So basically what we expose here is not the entirety of the work of the practice but also the details of leading it. So these are like just like examples of the types of work that we had in the directions that we had looked into but we can always also of course mention more projects in the discussion. Thank you both for this brief intro into the work that you've been doing over the years. I thought I just kind of, I mean, thinking about your work over the past few weeks, looking at it online and now hearing you talk about your work I thought I would just raise a few issues that come to mind or ideas that come to mind and really just thinking about how Keifa does work really challenges our idea of publishing today and then maybe I can, I have a few questions we can discuss those and we can then open up the floor in the last few minutes or maybe the last 20 or so minutes of our discussion today. So anybody who had questions please plug them into the Q&A box at the bottom. So one thing that I'm really interested in is sort of this how-to genre or the Kefeta and you explain how there's this sort of interest in this DIY genre as one that's related to access and availability or popularity but as you've also shown this is not a specific didactic commitment rather it's also about sort of unlearning or ephemeralizing and diversifying learning. So, and I think in one of the conversations that we had on the phone or not the phone but we were talking earlier before today that this essentially starts as sort of a philosophical gesture as an opportunity to be reflective and experimental in considering the idea of knowledge and its acquisition. And in this way I've been thinking of whether it would be if one can also read this Kefeta series as one that strives not only to upend the sort of DIY or self-help genre of publishing but also to really shake up the very core of a constructivist notion of knowledge production which has dominated academic discourse since the European Enlightenment. So here I'm specifically referring to this idea that was popularized in the 19th century that knowledge acquisition happens through a sort of an investigation of phenomena beyond the confines of the laboratory using specific tools or equipment. And so if we think about this more broadly it's this idea that anyone can acquire knowledge about anything if one has the tools and the guides to render the previously esoteric both visible and legible. And I feel that with your series although this sort of how-to's in general there's this interest in making knowledge legible really what the sort of legibility does it hides discrepancy and the sort of partiality of knowledge production and dissemination and essentially reproduces the fallacy of this notion that something can be universally comprehensible. And so for me I really where I think it's really important and compelling about pay for death series is that it challenges the illusion of legibility and comprehension by upending the very notion that a how-to or that even publishing with large has a sort of revelatory or universally comprehensible capacity. So this is one point that maybe we could talk more about it but this is one idea. Another idea that pops to mind when looking at your work and thinking about it is it brings to mind recent scholarship in the realm of book and print studies that calls for the inclusion of ephemeral. So typically this is often seen as a subordinate lesser form of fancy and pork within the broader sort of book narrative or canon. But instead of doing that what the call is to actually try to ephemeralize books themselves by questioning the indelibility of print by questioning the stability of print. And for me this is what's really interesting about your work as well is that it problematizes the sort of divide between monocle works or major works and minor works rather than trying to say minor works are also important. And so there's this sort of challenge that's happening in your project that is an important one not just for Arab publishing, Arabic publishing but actually for publishing history at large. And I really think it's important because it really underscores the unfixity and the mutability of plants that they're always changing. And it really challenges the idea and something that's persistent, surprisingly persistent today that when you print a text you stabilize it. Suddenly it's fixed and that has always been a fallacy that's always been not the case but in your work you're really completely abandoning this notion of fixity and making us rethink what publishing is. And in this case and here I'm bringing us to my last point, one can say that in the late 19th century we've understood regional publishing as being one that's focused on specific hubs or centers both in their physical sense but also in their standardization of practices. Then Pehfata's work through focusing on alternative publishing practices it's actively trying to remind us how translocal these practices really are. So as you can say that Pehfata's strives to decentralize globalized standards and practices such as distribution networks or ISBNs and I know you have a project, the no ISBN project maybe we could talk a little bit about that. And we also see sort of the varied formats and forms that publishing can be a way maybe for publishing to subsist outside of the dominant networks or dominant mediums of production and circulation. So through your publication of a song for instance that's something that struck me. And at the same time and I don't know if I'm reading too much into this here but I really feel that these projects are inherently decolonial. But here the colonial or the imperial is not simply the socio or geopolitical but also the medium specific, the standardized to centralize systems of the publishing industry. And I'm particularly compelled here to draw a parallel to this notion of shape-shifting from your exhibitions. And whenever, when I thought, when I first came across that term in your exhibitions in Beirut it struck me and it was something that stuck with me even now when I'm thinking about your work I find it extremely intriguing to think about the shape-shifter. We often encounter the notion of a shape-shifter in science fiction where an object transforms into another via some sort of external intervention whether it's an inherent superpower or magic divine intervention or some alien abilities. But what's really interesting is shape-shifting defines the illusion of logic, of coherence of fixity of our reality. And it really unhinges the supposedly spable constructs that we think of through an external and unfathomable power. So really destabilizes, not just publishing but our very reality and sort of exposes it for what is. And also, in this way it kind of pushes away false realities in favor of really spending time with the fleeting and the ephemeral. So in some ways I'm wondering if we can think about the shape-shifter as sort of a revolutionary or maybe as a Baudelairean social poet or a social artist or even as a hacker or a virus that's destabilizing a demonic publishing and knowledge-making practices. And to that end, I mean, and here I can open it up with a question for you. This idea of shape-shifting, how much does it play into your practice? So if the shape-shifter can and must continuously destabilize a work's construct and categories how does that happen in the nature of the exhibitions that you are producing or in the nature of the work that you produce? Besides just sort of shape-shifting texts like moving from one medium to the next I'm talking about sort of how there's also a need an inherent need to not stabilize, right? To keep trying to catch the sort of fleeting ephemeral aspect. So I have that question for you both and there's a few other questions that we can think of but I'm wondering if there are any thoughts on that. Maybe I'll just start by saying it. Yeah, the shape-shifting part it's for us something that we felt is really inherent to this practice of alternative publishing because it's kind of a way of maneuvering obstacles all the time or of trying to redefine a practice because certain forms are not admitted or certain voices are not admitted or certain biographies are not admitted. So you have to play around that and you have to kind of maneuver in ways that are very different from one practitioner to the other. And like you said, sometimes it's text taking different forms. So instead of publishing like a printed book then came the era of blogs then came the era of tweets then can you know, like different or audio, you know things like that. But also there's other kind of ways of, like you mentioned the NOISDN project where producers chose to not be part of a certain system and to hold on to a certain invisibility, right? So to kind of wanting to really step out of this very, this kind of standard global system of circulation and to try to buy choice by sometimes for political reasons sometimes for artistic reasons they chose to operate in smaller circles and less visible circles. And that was also something like a line that we followed in the exhibitions but also in the research and the publications later. Like it's not always like the goal to be the most like highly distributed, you know or highly visible or something. Some practices choose to do the opposite. And also with like the medium that you choose like maybe printing now on paper is something that is maybe less visible than you know posting something online. But maybe I move to Ale if she has an example in mind but we can alternate now between us as we go. Because you spoke about, yeah I like the readings that you've produced of the work. Yes, we were thinking that many things and many things there is, for instance the Trojan horse that is our logo is pulled by is basically something about, is about something that is hidden that is being passed into some, you know that is brought from one place to another through some sort of a shell. And it's being pulled by two persons. And yeah, we were, that's why we were at the beginning trying to think that we can maybe produce and you were open to the possibility that the author does not want to have his name or her name on the book on the cover or that we collaborate with, you know book vendors on the street, you know who are, you know, selling mixed books books, you know the original and pirated books we even thought that how do we trick pirates to pirate all books basically to start taking these books and circulate them by paying for them and just, you know, how do we like what sorts of what would, you know, what would take our book to the pirated market and so on because we wanted to reach out to, yeah, we wanted, we thought that we wanted to share. So there is a voices that we are interested in hearing but we also think that it's interesting if we get also the general public, the public that does not necessarily walk into the exhibition space to read the text that we think that we are also reading and maybe it feeds back somehow and this was really happening in fact because one way or another maybe through our collaborations with some of the writers who had their own fan base who when they liked one book their favorite writer's book they bought other books from the series and it started to grow in these directions on the readers but also on us, you know that we have readership from very much outside our own networks. So these are all what is happening in the pocket size books but for the research that we have done on the publishing projects we were thinking that, yeah, besides everything besides like how we learn from all of this knowledge and how we could possibly collaborate as we are trying to produce our publications but also to meet up with other publishers is that we as we generate all this information as we generate or accumulate all this knowledge and information maybe it's best that we are also sharing it with sharing this information with others because this would also prepare more chances for more publishing projects to appear or to be supported or to be followed or to be read or to be pursued and so on. And so this is what started also our second series How to Publish. So this is a size of the small series that we have and this is the size of the larger series which just knew how to maneuver is the first publication which was enabled and co-published through the exhibition and co-published with Warehouse 421 and so what happens in these publications and this how to publish publications is that we are producing, we are commissioning research or we are reprinting it or we're asking the writers to give us the right to publish their texts that they might have produced for other contexts or to look particularly into the issue of publishing and what also happens or the nice things that happens throughout these processes is that some publishing projects were born in the process whether through, we don't know if because of how they read the work of Kaifata or they were, or they, or they, but they were like Francis there's a very nice publishing group from Amman called Addub al-Ahmar al-Rusya which translates as a wide, red bear and they published almost six books or more in one show which is like their inaugural launch, their launch was six publications or so in our, and there was their first exhibition was basically in our exhibition, Amman and they keep experimenting with formats and it's very nice to see echoes and you to see like parallel projects happening around us and yeah, so these are some of the points that could relate to, or could expand a little bit further on to link to your reading but Maha seems to be, to want to say something. Yeah, just very quickly, I just wanted to say like this again, back to the word shapeshifting in no, it's a way of learning also, so it's a way of evading or trying to get over obstacles but then you learn in the process and like what I wanted to refer to maybe is our own experience so we are artists who then started to become curators because in response to a certain artistic and cultural realities that where we have to play that role sometimes because there aren't many people doing that, so sometimes you have to kind of curate a show but then sometimes you have to be a publisher and then you feel like you need to be a publisher then that's another, it is kind of our own shapeshifting and through that process we learn things about there are of course a lot of resonances between our publishing experience and our experience as artists and curators again and how a professional sphere is organized how it's different types of gatekeeping or of forms that are popular or that are gained visibility and others it's not like there's a lot of similarities between curatorial and artistic work and publishing and we learn from that and then in our process as publishing we choose to try the kind of alternative way which is like not the publishing house but like the project format in which we also use our background as artists and curators and try to support this publishing project through applying for funds to the art side of things not to, we don't even have never accessed I don't know what funds are available for publishing houses so we kind of tap into our previous experiences and bring that in and also it provides this space of circulation for again authors who are not part of this who are not visible to this kind of audience before so we kind of bring funds from one sphere and place it in another and then take the product and place it elsewhere the same we have done like Ella has mentioned in our shows where production budgets which usually go for artists to produce artworks we kind of always try to direct some of these funds to publishing books by others you know or like enabling one of the pictures that Ella had shown before is this book that we thought was really interesting and resonated with our experience also with whether to choose to print with an ISBN or not and what are the political meanings of that or the artistic meanings behind that and we got to know the work of this Austrian artist Bernard Chella and this reader he made of different practices internationally and we thought that's actually quite that resonates a lot with what we've been experiencing and researching and our interest in general so we decided that this is okay this is an production of the show and part of the funding will go to translating the book and publishing it so it's also there is this fluidity right that we try to capitalize on and maybe this is the shape-shifting part like we try to capitalize on this fluidity of exiting certain kind of very very codified ways of working or like spaces that are really separated like so what is in the art space what is in the bookstore what is in what is considered an artwork what is considered publishable things like that and yeah I'm wondering I mean before I kind of take questions we have quite a few questions from the audience you know wouldn't you be shape-shifting into archivists as well I mean knowing that you kind of became you were artists and you become curators and you're publishers and then you're like researching based on the experiences that you've had with the exhibitions and the projects how have you been kind of sort of you know are you interested in kind of archiving your work and I guess this can tie into a question that we have from the audience in relationship to how you're translating the sort of the work publication the how-to publications into the digital realm so I mean we didn't really talk a lot about the digital realm in relationship to your work and so I mean on the one hand is sort of the archival president is that a question that or some construct that you're engaging with even if intellectually and then how does your work relate to the digital realm I mean how are you incorporating the digital realm who shall start you start and then I'll speak about the digital like when you say is the archival part of our interests you mean like archives that are already present or like well I'm just kind of just throwing it out there given that your research grew out of having done the exhibitions so it's not like you thought to research how publishing is done right I mean you kind of yeah kind of responding right you're you're responsive to it's sort of a generative process and I'm wondering whether the archival has kind of been included right now or to given the interest in in relationship to certain exhibitions and practices yeah it's interesting how we kind of started from the middle right from so we started from our own hands-on experience as beginner publishers right and as we went along we started understanding the landscape right and like there's an obstacle here there's an obstacle there and then starting to focus on these things and like how to circulate the book how to issue an ISBN number stuff like examples and this kind of our research was very focused on kind of these little obstacles here and there and then our interest in publishing as a field started to grow and which started a more kind of formal research and in terms of archives so when we started to want to know more about alternative publishing practices like if you're not an academic I guess it's very hard right you don't find this first there's not a lot that is published and it's not that available so we start as we go creating our own kind of archive or our own mapping of the history of alternative publishing or publishing in general it's not that publishing in general like with a capital piece that also well researched or like maybe it's well researched but it's not published and available for someone who's not really focusing on the subject but and that's why I say a kind of I think we kind of built it's kind of growing in an organic way or in an eclectic way this mapping so we kind of come across things not necessarily in a chronological order so we kind of maybe know of something from the 90s and has like the much more than something that's like more recent or more it's just like the way things appear in our exhibitions has to do with this organic getting to know a subject either through hands-on experience or through what we gradually get to learn through our research so we are creating kind of our own archives in a sense of for example interviews that we started conducting and recording and that which become part of our research or that become part things that are shared in exhibitions for example in the exhibition so in how to appear there was a recording with Sun'Allah Ibrahim that Allah had done for example about his prison diaries or other kinds of archives or we commissioned a research into this master movement this movement that is also not is very little known this movement of independent publishing in the 80s and 90s mostly in Egypt which also you find very little information about so again this you start looking into this kind of trying to look for these magazines these very ephemeral kind of publications and you start finding them with some of the people who are working on them and still have copies or you find someone has uploaded a pdf but not of one issue out of 20 you know so it's like that and Allah was going to talk about digital so yes I just also wanted to add that in this process even when we are accessing archives or so for instance when we met on Allah or when I also visited the archives of Majalit Majid like Majid magazine and Abu Dhabi or the way we tried to also bring the original physical documents from Simón Fatal and so on and we were also we were also organizing these public talks that were also commenting and revisiting or kind of also explaining or sometimes also answering you know parts of our questions but also parts of also or explaining further than the practices of these histories or these archives that we were interested in so it was like you know so it's just like layers and layers of archives that are being produced or layers and layers of materials that are being somehow more accessible so for the digital all these materials for instance the symposium that we organized with the warehouse in Abu Dhabi in early 2020 for instance has is all posted online is all available online on youtube and it has you know it has gone through you know like from publishing to the nation and like like it was just like narrowing down the you know the scope and the number of possibly like the staff or the people who are engaged or involved in the process or in the act of publishing to just one person so it just like starts from the you know this nation wide project until like you know notice that it's printing this publication on a kitchen table and algears or something so what we also like the digital has allowed us also to you know in corona but also other times to basically have you know our books as e-books where they could also be available and you know to people in different geographies just at the right time just right at the time when they are published because when because we like and we would like to stick to that also to like we're committed to the print you know to have like our books printed but this also puts a lot of pressure on us or because once the book comes out in a certain city so many people in other cities want it like in other countries and it just becomes we need a good distribution network or you need also to be moving around or we need to be moving around or friends to be moving around to carry them or we need to delay you know the launch until the books are everywhere and then we launch which also puts a lot of you know other questions on like the process and just delays the process which is not something that we try to avoid because of our you know because of the facilities that independent being independent publishers offer us but what I also wanted to say is that these digital notions I mean we have produced two of our books as digital books and we're producing the rest now and the rest of the books and we are we have also experimented with audio books and the podcast that we co-produced with MME just from the MAG foundation the context of our show there has been a great site also for experimentation for you know extending the space of the exhibition onto the web where also in times when you know the physical site was not even accessible for us in Amman because of the closures, the COVID closures so it was very interesting to not just to interview the people who have taken part in the show but also to think how we can produce the research that we commissioned and we didn't manage to show because of the show was interrupted to produce it in you know in a podcast for instance and how to link that to other materials and other archives that we have worked with so that people can understand what sort of content we're talking about when they cannot see what it is so we basically link reso printers in Amman to Tuna Allah Brahim's books or an archive also to a publication by a Palestinian writer on printing in Gaza in the 50s so we do this all in one podcast for instance so this some these formats had enabled some experimentation as well that is as interesting and yeah and our launches as well or maybe this is a good moment to speak about the song that we commissioned so we also thought when the book was about Can I interrupt you just before we delve into the song there was an earlier question and this is like a more of a direct question Maxine Danat is asking was the books that you publish in the KFTA series are they in Fusha or are they in Ambi and how was Fusha and so how was this decided she's asking the authors that we invited they wrote in Fusha although there are like some lines in Iman Mirsa's book How to Men that are in Egyptian Malik but all together the books are in Fusha or translated when they are translated they are translated into Fusha I guess I mean to some extent it's a question of how do you determine I mean how was that determined it's just because the version of Arabic that publishing occurs in or have you considered publishing in dialects you know like we did not take a position for either the authors if they presented their manuscripts in dialect we would have published them in dialect and if they had wanted the translations in dialect they would have been made in dialect so we don't have a position for or against it's the authors of the choice so here I'm showing some pages some like pages from the inner pages of this is from How to Men which was originally authored in Arabic in Fusha and Clarissa Burt has a couple questions the first is she's saying I think you kind of answered this question but I'll read it out loud anyways materials in from your exhibition we're collected from the producers from the 80s and 90s in Egypt in view of that fact there are still a few copies of these materials are you committing these materials to the digital or another form of archives so that they're accessible so the materials from your exhibitions are you digitizing them taking that extra step so that's just the first question and then she asks what are the sources of the funding of the funding you distribute in your commissioning so when you commission authors I think that's what Clarissa meant how are you I mean what kind of funding are you tapping into here the funding you distribute in your commissioning so like yeah so I guess the funding for the book series we approach funding institutions for arts and cultures so our first but also like several books of ours were funded through the young Arab theater fund which later became they have the small production grant which we applied to and got for the first book and then it was more of a collaboration for two later books and sometimes yeah we get invited to curate an exhibition like the how to reappear and we allocate some of the funding to make a new how to for example like the Nostraddin book how to see the columns of the palace as palm trees so we invited him as an artist he both had an installation in the show but we also produced a case of how to for him as for the Kitaba Sauda and Al Jarat so these publications that Clarissa refers to are from this master movement which I refer to that is kind of not a lot of people know of outside of people who are really interested and these we had commissioned research into into that and the researcher Ali we wrote a paper on the subject which we published in the how to maneuver book he met with some of the of the producers of these magazines and borrowed some of their own copies for the show in Abu Dhabi but we have we of course want to digitize them and some of some of these people we would we ask them that if we can come back and digitize the rest of the stuff if possible but also there is also another artist researcher we know who has that as a project like received funding as has this as a project to digitize these magazines from the 80s and 90s but just to refer I'll send you a link Clarissa of a website that has some copies has for example a table so that for example so I'll just place the link and you can view it online and if I can take a few more of the questions so there's a question that Annika Lensen raised earlier on in relationship to bookstores and I believe you did address this idea in your presentation but I was wondering if just to clarify you don't currently distribute your publications to regular bookstores right you have them mostly. We do have our books and we try to have our books in whichever bookshop that accepts to have the books there so for instance we have several bookstores in Cairo they are not necessarily art specialized bookstores but they are also in art institutions such as CIC it's the same case in Beirut where we have our books at the little bookshop off Hamra street but also at Snober Beirut and Beirut at Centre before that they were also at Dawin maybe these are alternative and I think you do rely on the Arabic whether it's just so we don't go ourselves except to focal point which is organized by Shaja Art Foundation they always have our books there as well we don't travel ourselves to the bookstores to the book fairs with our books in fact they travel with the bookstores that we put them at for instance they travel with with Tanmiya bookstore to several Arab book fairs and they travel a lot around the US and as well and also in Europe with the partners that we collaborated with so yeah the book fairs are also a good chance for the books to travel and to arrive to other places but we're not super dependent on that yet maybe the bookstores are and we just supply the bookstores but we also have the online stores so we also have them on Jamalon and try to have them also on as many as possible of online stores so yeah it's just we try and we have them also in Berlin in London at the Mosaic rooms there's a couple of bookstores in London as well in the US, New York, two bridges and so on so we try to be everywhere as much as we can and Anika's question actually is an interesting question did you insist on putting the books in the how-to section in the regular bookstores or not is this something that you thought of or no it didn't ask for a particular positioning but they're normally they're always included in a very particular space on their own because they're a series so they have their own corner and they're very close to that you share next to and I can go to Hansel I guess this question of bookstores can take us to readers and Rebecca Donston raises an interesting point here she says you know is it only the publisher that can call the text to shape shift or Pena read a reader shift the text or object through how they read or use or interpret it first there are likely publishing editing writing tactics that can create an opening for the reader to do so so another way to ask how do you engage the reader as well as part of this shape shifting process or is the reader factored into how you conceive of the shape shifting text so we always think of the readers that's the first thing to tell anyways I mean the whole idea of choosing how to format is basically because we wanted to simplify as much as possible or to use that this popular notion the fact that it's a pocket size book as well but also in the shows but how do we engage the readers beyond them being readers I mean maybe from like the just like the regular formats of of through the book launches online readings things like that we have them I think maybe one way of engaging the readers or we hope we hoped like and this was in the kind of conception of the thing is that by kind of mixing the authors like the different styles of writing that are in this one series or the different kind so you have a like I'm mentioning you have a kind of more known writer from Egypt for example with an artist who people don't know in Egypt so the readers then has in this one series these different kinds of writing different levels of of fame or whatever so we thought that this would create a different readership right in kind of placing these different genres of writing in the same in the same series and that are also all kind of priced similarly so we don't have like the famous writer books are like you know different than the less famous one but yeah I don't think I can also yeah I can also say a few things first of all that we chose that not just the price of the book is as low as possible that we can afford so that it's also like you know the people pick up the book faster and they also can gift it and they can also you know keep copies of it and so on and we also there was also the like the open call to like we did several open calls to have like you know people send us you know their own experiments of of self-made publications or no has been books or things of this sort and there was another thing that I remembered but now I forgot but because I haven't spoken about the song I also thought when we are mentioning the song is that there is some sort of rigidity you know when we are translating or writing our introduction or you know text about Kaifatan especially when we are translating this into Arabic or something you know that maybe puts people off or make it sound a little bit you know some people off or make it sound a little bit like rigid or a little bit like what is this project about and so like we thought that when we are mixing also these when we are commissioning a song maybe there's a way to for people to memorize you know how we speak about Kaifatan research is about and so this becomes like something that is memorizable and you know and so it comes across or it kind of engages better faster or engages far more people or engages them in a different way than you know reading the text that way so these were yeah and we did a lot of workshops as well like for for instance like one of our books with Natasha Soderhagyan the string figure so we did a couple of workshops on that and oh yeah now I remember that last point there are so many people who had reached out to us because they wanted to use the text to design a new book or to design a new cover for the book or to use the text in a sound work or to use the text in workshop or to build a theater piece or a small theater piece on one of the texts or the books have or parts of the text of the books have you know morphed into so many other shapes and possibilities other than the printed format or the Kaifatan format already and it has gone out in so many other formats through the interventions of their readership of the readership maybe I play the song now oh yeah I want ok fine what the thing is there's just one more question in relationship to readership and then we'll play the last question and then we'll play the song what is your opinion on the current state and future of art book fairs in the world and what can these formats of distribution bring to the conversation art book fairs are great I mean book fairs are great and art book fairs are also great they I mean the focal point has been really very very successful in Sharjah they held it over three days almost three days and I think most of the publications get sold on the first day imagine the type of income that comes to all these like independent publishers or like small you know people who have printed their own books you know at home and home bound and everything yeah so there's a lot of interesting space there for not just like reading interesting content and also like learning more about practices but also for supporting them and so many times people have written to us ahead of time to ask us if our books are going to already be at focal point and had asked like to buy five or six or ten of each title so because they know they're coming to stock and take back to their own bookshops so it's probably a good place for also like establishing some sort of distribution network or so so yeah I think book fairs or the book fairs are very good although the book fairs themselves have are suspected of some people say that they have killed the distribution networks because like across and that could be that could have been established between the 20s because you know just like people travel for the book fair and they sell and they stock and other bookstores stock and that's it so distribution networks are not so effective because of this possibility that happens once a year but I don't think there's enough anyways book art book fairs to for a network to be you know affected anyways by this or perhaps I think it's going to be born from that and one thing that we have already experimented in by any case that has experimented with this basically we KFTA and Barakunan which is a group or a collective a publishing collective from Beirut and Berlin that have we have featured in the three shows and also in some of our online projects together we found you know very like we like so much in common and also like in terms of interest and so we sat together and we thought how do we like create some sort of a network a distribution network even if it starts as a newsletter and so we co-founded a newsletter called Shalaputo which translates as into a turtle in Akkadian and it was also like we reached out to the people that we have invited throughout you know the three editions of KFTA and its symposium and invited them to contribute their news and latest news and latest publications or releases so that we included in this newsletter and so far we have issued one issue only of Shalaputo but we hope to yeah this is like an open call to all publishers to share with us their their news because we could also like we thought that through this network we can build a stronger and faster connections between independent publishers from all across the world and then easily somehow log into you know each other's like access to venues to bookstores to book fairs and so on Thank you that's so much for answering all of these questions and I think I should hand this over to Hannah and Dan we're past time but I know that Ella wanted to share the song as well do we have time for that or we don't? I'm quite happy to for all the people who stuck around definitely yeah I'm happy to do that and I want to hear it too thank you so the text of this song is taken from a text that is in how to maneuver publication amazing amazing amazing amazing I'm glad to read it I'm quite