Taking Form, Making Worlds

Imagine an academic library whose books, in an act of defiance, run riot, escaping their covers and spilling out their contents far and wide. Imagine all the cardboard, lying abandoned, having been emptied of the consumer goods it once contained. And imagine the joy of all the people who could never afford the goods or enter the academy, when they discover that by stitching fugitive words with salvaged cardboard, they could give new life to both. Welcome to cartonera! In this impeccably crafted study, Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O’Hare show how the collective practice of cartonera not only crosses the frontier between art and literature, but also has the potential to turn the stuffy world of letters upside down.

— Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, author of Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

Bell, Ungprateeb Flynn, and O’Hare’s compelling interdisciplinary approach to the cartonera publishing phenomenon in Latin America brilliantly enmeshes process, product, and context. Their 'transformal' methodology threads together fieldwork, bookmaking, and interartistic 'encounters' in Brazil and Mexico, launching an original and powerful collective project. Taking Form, Making Worlds invites readers into the cartonera groups’ hands-on aesthetic practice, into their literary corpus, and into their local settings, with nuanced and sensitive analysis. The authors go beyond research and writing to become activists and advocates as they intervene in grassroots urban arts and literature collectives’ minoritarian social and political organizing.

— Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers University, author of Public Pages: Reading along the Latin American Landscape

If handmade books don't immediately come to mind when thinking of 'objects of resistance' capable of breaking down prejudices and overturning the canon, they will after reading Taking Form, Making Worlds, a book about books. The authors beautifully recount stories of individuals who form collective bodies as they publish through the cartonera movement. A strategic reorganization of the systems of production and consumption turns into a lesson in everyday political practices, and we learn that separating an artistic project from its public function is a vain attempt to perpetuate the old dichotomies.

— Lisette Lagnado, chief curator of the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, “How to Live Together" (2006) and co-curator of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2019–2020)

[Bell, Flynn and O'Hare] emphasize [cartonera publishing's] relation with decentralized grassroots organizing around the various manifestations of structural violence in Latin America based on the manifold experiences of marginalized communities such as LGBTQ, feminist, indigenous, or Zapatista movements. . . Situating cartonera publishing in this context . . . the authors resist a clear definition of the movement. Instead, they emphasise its shape-shifting character as a manifold and defiant positioning against the conditions of intersectional marginalization. . . Taking Form, Making Worlds makes an important methodological contribution by proposing and enacting more horizontal, collaborative and diverse ways of doing and representing scholarly research – while offering insights to other scholars who aim to engage in similar processes.

— Cultural Studies

[Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America] is a recommended read that folds together rich empirical material, innovative methods, original conceptualization, and a captivating narrative style.

— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute