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   ✹reading fabric dressed in paper
   ✹you can’t break the resistance
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   ✹[exhibition] queerpandèmia
   ✹[exhibition] paper afore press
   ✹[feature] dune Vol. 002 n. 002



READING RUG
A READABLE SPACE FOR READABLE OBJECTS
WITH READINGROUND

April 2023, The Netherlands

Readinground is a cross-disciplinary cluster positioned at the intersection of publishing, fashion, and printed matter. Readinground is the practical link between latent ideas and physical end results. Founded by Alia Mascia, Alice Alloggio, and Maria Spadoni, Readinground originates from the shared urgency for a playground where to connect and expand the urgencies which interrelate their individual artistic practices: the critical exploration of alternative, non-industrial modes and frameworks for making, doing, and experiencing fashion and clothes.

The Reading Rug is designed as a versatile and cross-disciplinary space that can accommodate different types of reading materials such as garments, booklets, zines, and (text)iles. The published objects can be browsed through, flipped, unfolded, worn, and experienced by the visitors, who can inhabit the Rug as a playful reading space. The Reading Rug originates from our necessity to create shared spaces within the extensive field of publishing, where to foster the encounter of plural collectivities that engage in alternative making and research.

We aim to question the traditional fair setting by creating a playful reading space where to engage and interact with the fashion item as a publishing platform and display how our individual researches dialogue in their fundamental intents. The Reading Rug discloses the core around which Readinground’'s both collective and individual practices are articulated, which is the extensive field of publishing as an artistic practice. The project takes a critical perspective on the publishing and fashion industry and aims to expand the notion of what a publishing practice can be.

The content published on the Rug unfolds through four conceptual cores, that are closely intertwined. These four clusters can be conceived as the theoretical framework from which our practices arise, and they gather quotes, fragments of texts, theoretical references, and definitions that shape our practices and field of interest.

  1. Artistic Research ⊙
  2. Publishing ☁
  3. (Re)Publishing ✱
  4. Garment Publishing ≡






 
Reading Rug bibliography
Gilbert, A. (ed). (2016). Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Goldsmith, K. (2005). If It Doesn’t Exist on the Internet, It Doesn’t Exist. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/if_it_doesnt_exist.html.

Lefebvre, A. (2016). Portrait of the artist as publisher. Publishing as an alternative artistic practice. In A., Gilbert (Ed). Publishing as Artistic Practice. (pp. 52-112). Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Malik, R. (2008). Horizons of the publishable: publishing in/as literary studies. ELH, Volume 75 (Number 3, Fall 2008) pp. 707-735. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0016

O’Hare, L. (2012). Artists at Work: Nick Thurston. Afterall. Available at https://www.afterall.org/article/7239

Pichler, M. (ed.), (2019). Publishing Manifestos. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Pressman, J. (2009).The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature. In  Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age. Michigan Quarterly Review Fall 2009. University of Michigan Press.

Rosengren, M. (2009). Art + Research Does Not Equal Artistic Research. Art and Artistic Research. Zurich Yearbook of the Arts. Zurich: Vurlag.

Weinmar, E. (2014). One Publishes to Find Comrades. Leipzig: Spector Books.

Weinmar, E. (2016). Library Underground: a Reading List for a Coming Community. in Gilbert, A. (ed). Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Wesseling, J. (2016). Of Sponge, Stone and the Intertwinement with the Here and Now. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Wesseling, J., Cramer, F. (Eds). (2022). Making Matters. A Vocabulary for Collective Arts. Amsterdam: Valiz.