The lecture by Clara Balaguer followed by a Q&A session is hosted on Zoom on Thursday 14 May at 16.00

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Lecture 'Publishing as Bloodletting: On the Circulation of Public Humours'

A lecture delivered in fragments. On the extended simile of making public as a form of bloodletting. Research or content or cultural capital as bodily humour, signaling vigor, nourishment, the imperative to circulate, and embodied practice. The independent researcher-publisher as convalescent, afflicted with all manner of precarious ills or, on the contrary, engorged with access to cultural capital and institutional resources, bound by duty to redistribute to limbs furthest away from the source, from the center of the body of knowledge. Books as leeches on the body public. Circulation as a physical act—books do not move themselves. The act of (independent, unsanctioned) publishing as a creation of value that is located in the body, because implication of the body is needed to circulate in networks.

Bio - CLARA BALAGUER (Manila, 1980) is a cultural worker. From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural and underserved communities in the Philippines through the Office of Culture and Design, a residency space and social practice platform. In 2015, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz interested in horror vacui, thickening research on the post-(or de-) colonial vernacular, collectivizing authorship, and the value of the error. Currently, she coordinates the Social Practices course at Willem de Kooning Academy and teaches Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that intimate her service in a given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined.

TO BE DETERMINED is an undocumented organization that has recently migrated to the Netherlands from the Philippines and other places, assuming a new name and identity. It is curious about models of collectivizing authorship (be it credited, anonymous, or divested), underground railroads (in plain sight) to institutional access, territory constructed between repose and transit (including languages spoken by any inhabitants), and the decolonization of cultural work through the lens of the contemporary (post-colonial) vernacular. It is currently molting or in the process of determining how it must operate within a foreign landscape. But what is clear, at this point in time, is that TBD is (still) comprised of sleeper cells and yet-to-be-determined networks that activate and deactivate in response to external factors: abundance to be distributed, urgencies to be addressed, or leisure to be. When prompted, TBD identifies as a social practice performance.