Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: For a Love of Softness
By Be Oakley
GenderFail, 2021
Paperback, 5 x 7.5 in.
52 pages
$17.50
WPA Note:
Be Oakley was invited to be a part of WPA's Bookshelves series in 2018 as part of "Paper Cuts Live" organized by Christopher Kardambikis. The recording of their conversation can be found on the Paper Cuts website.
Description:
Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice For a Love of Softness is printed in conjunction with the opening of Imperfect Archiving/Archiving as Practice a reading room by GenderFail Archive Project at Center for Book Arts. This manifesto speaks to core of GenderFail's collecting and archiving practices that looks to the softness of the collected and archived book as a metaphor for the type of content that are housed within. The GenderFail Archive Project is a socially engaged reading room that looks at archiving as a social activity. The project stems from GenderFail’s desire to share the publications from their personal library and give a platform to other publishers that they cherish. Imperfect Archiving/Archiving as Practice shows its full collection of over 1,000 art books, artist books and zines for the first time.
About the Author(s):
GenderFail is a publishing, programing and archiving platform run solely by Be Oakley. Oakley says, "With GenderFail, publishing is personal, it’s a means of my livelihood and a tool for the dissemination of imperfect, but powerful idea. For GenderFail, we seek to publish works that expand queer subjectivity by looking at queerness as an identity that challenges capitalist, racist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideologies."