Eros, Oikos: Visualizing and Making Good Relations
Melissa Adler, Western University – FIMS; Hazel Jane Plante, Simon Fraser University; Gretchen Alexander, Pratt Institute, NYPL; Julia Bell
Toronto 2021: Justice
Useful+Beautiful is a group of library/archives/museum workers and students who create models that foreground multiple relationalities. We privilege personal and local knowledge organization practices and use methods at the intersections of art, story-telling, poetry, and craft to revise or resist global standards. Hazel Jane Plante, an academic librarian and trans writer, will contribute fragments from her Borgesian project Miscellaneous Kisses, which conjures an imagined film by an imagined trans artist to illustrate Sandy Stone’s destabilizing concept of transness as genre and a “set of embodied texts [with] potential for productive disruption.” Gretchen Alexander, a graduate student at Pratt’s iSchool, and Julia Bell, a software developer, are creating a metaphorical “home” as an online site where knowledge is revisited and malleable. The site reflects the pair’s intimate correspondence and collective references, weaving together personal narrative and bibliographic material. A bibliographic collage will reflect the in-flux materials of the site/home. Project organizer Melissa Adler will present “Undoing Colonial Relations,” a wall hanging that uses different colored threads to connect books in Thomas Jefferson’s catalogue with present library classifications. This project uses Haraway’s notion of the game of Cat’s Cradle to visualize and undo the entanglements of Jefferson’s books with the present.
