Cartonera Publishing ResourcesThis project focuses on a contemporary publishing phenomenon that lies at the intersection between cultural trend and social movement, artistic intervention and community project. Known in Latin America as editoriales cartoneras, they are often referred to as ‘cardboard publishers’, because one feature that unites the diverse publishing projects is the material from which they make their books: recycled cardboard. Yet the term ‘cartonera’ encompasses far more than ‘cartón’, the English word ‘cardboard’. It is also a reference to the cartonero figure, the ‘cardboarders’ who turned to the waste streams of Buenos Aires for a living after becoming unemployed in the wake of the economic crisis (2001). It was from these urban recoverers that Eloísa began to buy cardboard at five times the market price to cover their hand-made books, and it was with them that they set up a productive publishing workshop that has published over 200 titles since 2003. Some of them, like Eloísa and Dulcinéia (São Paulo), continue to work directly with waste-pickers. Many others, though, have recycled the model, adapting it to their particular local contexts, communities and social needs. This has led to diverse collaborations between cartoneras, school groups, immigrants and refugees, indigenous communities, peace organizations, and so on.
Through interdisciplinary research, carried out in collaboration with our cartonera partners within an ethos of horizontality, we aim to:
(1) Understand why and how cartonera practices have travelled so rapidly and widely, with a focus on the aesthetic and social forms that have driven this growth.
(2) Explore how the socio-material practices of cartonera publishing inform or complicate our understandings of social movements, resistance and activism.
(3) Develop an innovative methodological framework that might be employed by a global community of academics and practitioners seeking to understand – or take part in – contemporary artistic practices with a focus on activism, resistance and social change.
In order to explore the connections and divergences inherent in cartonera practices, we focus on two projects from Mexico – La Cartonera (Cuernavaca) and La Rueda (Guadalajara) – and two from Brazil – Dulcinéia Catadora (São Paulo) and Catapoesía (Minas Gerais) – in the context of the broader cartonera community (within and beyond Latin America). This comparative approach is combined with an interdisciplinary research methodology. Intersecting formal literary analysis with ethnographic methods, we consider the projects simultaneously as a collection of artistic texts and objects and as a set of production methods, everyday interactions, and organizational logics, oriented toward social transformation. This interdisciplinarity operates in two directions: a set of participative, presence-oriented ethnographic methods – from encuentros to exhibitions – have been extrapolated from the textual forms themselves; simultaneously, the texts are analysed through the lens of the social forms and collective practices through which they are produced.
This project makes a number of contributions to research across different humanities and social science disciplines. From a literary angle, it fills a significant gap in research: though these publishers have attracted attention from scholars and journalists since 2003, their focus has largely been on their production processes, leaving the literary form and content of the books unexplored. Our project explores how the multiple forms of the books (as literary, philosophical or political texts and as art objects) play a key part in creating new relations, communities and meaning. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, it explores the ways in which theories of social movements can be productively broadened out to include – or dialogue with – phenomena that, like cartoneras, are not only artistic in character, but also fragmentary, fragile and precarious. Finally, our innovative use of interdisciplinary methods makes this a ground-breaking study for scholars and practitioners around the world seeking to engage with practices – like Ni una menos, Bordamos por la Paz, the Tendedero project, and so many others – that are simultaneously artistic and activist, aesthetically innovative and socially oriented.
Ungprateeb Flynn, Alex, Lucy Bell, and Patrick O’Hare. “About the Project | Cartonera Publishing.” Cartonera Publishing (blog). Accessed February 23, 2021. http://cartonerapublishing.com/about-the-project/.
