Saturday 25 January 2014
Grand Union, Birmingham
Copies of books held in the Piracy Collection circulate the world through underground circles of distribution. Some are sold as artists’ books, some are made for private use, and some are one-offs made especially for this collection. All bring up peculiar questions about who the real authors are and what is seen as the real content. How should we classify these books or locate them within a library? Is a perfect copy of a novel the same as the original and should therefore be categorised identically to the original copy, with the same subject and author?
Libraries have long been the repositories of our printed culture and with it our perception of knowledge and a standard for the representation of culture. How they are organised, and what they choose to classify becomes institutionalised through time. How can libraries deal with the acceleration of the instability of texts and the shaky grounds of authorship?
Join Karen Di Franco (archivist for Book Works and curator at CHELSEA space) with Piracy Project founders Eva Weinmayr and Andrea Francke, to find better terms of classification in an open discussion at Grand Union.
We made notes on pirate pad.
