It’s a book, it’s a seed to grow, it’s a world to show – HGB Leipzig

From itsabook.de:

As has often been the case, last year’s theme will give rise to a new one. This year at It’s a book, … we are asking not so much how as why: Why do we still have to publish physically? “One publishes to find comrades,” is how André Breton once put it in one sentence.

He was probably not interested in simply publishing contents, let alone convincing readers of something. Rather, it was about creating a Resonanzraum (resonance space). This is his insight for us: publishing is not merely the result of a thinking process, a craft or an artistic work, but as a social practice it sets processes in motion and creates conditions and relationships for collaboration.

The lyrical three-chord phrase It’s a book, it’s a seed to grow, it’s a world to show is an image for the space in which we act and the network that we seek and create, with which we operate. The seed and the associated planting and growing are metaphors for collaborations and for the dissemination of printed matter—and the ideas associated with it. If we follow Breton, we can assume that the structures of the productive processes surrounding publishing are just as important as what is actually published: communicating objects that are simply more than just commodities, but rather self-aware goods. They reproduce images and texts that convey subjectivity and a reference to the world—and that can also speak for themselves. Their content, design, and materiality become valuable in their own right (when seen as a whole) and produce meaning. The book is fleeting and enduring at the same time and can thus be embedded in new spaces again and again and become part of new social structures of relation. Now and in the future.