At a time when planetary systems are under strain—from environmental degradation to information overload—publishing finds itself at a crossroads. The challenges we face are not only ecological, but also epistemic and material: how do we produce and share knowledge without further exhausting the world? In this context, the future of publishing cannot be reduced to digital acceleration or technological novelty. What it demands is a reorientation—a shift toward practices of reparation, attention, and care.

This shift does not begin with innovation, but with recovery: of materials, gestures, stories, and relations. It involves looking again at what has been overlooked—what is deemed obsolete, insufficient, or discarded—and asking what it can become. In the tangled matter of print culture—its offcuts, misprints, and remainders—lie the seeds of another kind of editorial practice. One that treats waste not as an endpoint, but as a medium of transformation. Publishing, in this expanded sense, becomes an act of listening and remaking—a form of world-building grounded in aesthetic responsibility and ethical regeneration.

The act of reusing discarded paper, printing proofs, or abandoned log sheets is not simply an ecological gesture. It is a declaration of editorial care—a commitment to matter, process, and duration. In these acts, we can glimpse an alternative temporality of publishing: one that is not driven by novelty or market cycles, but by reuse, reconfiguration, and relational value. This is aligned with Ivan Illich’s (1973) notion of conviviality, which calls for tools and systems that enable autonomy, cooperation, and regeneration rather than dependence or obsolescence.

Yet in many contexts, particularly in the Global South, this approach is not only an ecological or aesthetic choice—it emerges from necessity. Precarity becomes not a deficit, but a condition for invention. The limits of insufficiency—of not having enough, of working with what is at hand—become creative forces. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1942/1983) once wrote of the “material imagination”: the poetic and generative relationship between humans and raw matter. In the hands of precarious publishers, this imagination is not theoretical—it is tactical and immediate.

Artists such as Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco have long explored these logics of insufficiency, crafting works from detritus, dust, and ephemeral gestures. Their practices highlight a philosophy of minimal intervention, where fragility, play, and accident become central to the artwork’s form and meaning. In a similar vein, Brazilian artists and designers like Erika Verzutti or the duo O Grivo often operate at the intersection of reuse and poetics—integrating leftover materials into hybrid objects that evoke both resourcefulness and reverence.

In contemporary art, the use of precarity not merely as subject but as method reflects a profound engagement with instability, ephemerality, and resourcefulness. Few artists have made this approach as central to their work as Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco, whose practices navigate the limits of the everyday and the discarded to reveal alternate forms of value, play, and attention. Their gestures are often minor, almost invisible, yet deeply attuned to their material, social, and political environments.

As Cuauhtémoc Medina (1995) notes in his foundational essay Mexico City: Between the Limits, Alÿs “has developed a poetics of the insignificant” (p. 22), in which precariousness is not a deficit but a language. One of his most emblematic works, Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing) (1997), consists of the artist pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts completely. The action resists permanence and monumentalism, embracing futility and transformation as core principles. The ice becomes a metaphor for labor, entropy, and disappearance—a strategy of resistance through impermanence.

Gabriel Orozco similarly works with fragility and transience. In Yielding Stone (1992), he rolled a large plasticine ball through the streets, allowing it to accumulate dirt, dust, and traces of the urban environment. The piece is a literal recording of contingency, its form and content co-produced by its surroundings. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (2000) sees in Orozco’s practice a “critique of the monumental” and a deliberate “disarticulation of the sculptural object,” where the boundary between artwork and context becomes porous (p. 29).

Orozco’s interventions are often minimal and relational. In La D.S. (1993), he sliced a Citroën DS car lengthwise and reassembled it as a slimmer, unusable version of itself. The gesture renders the object both dysfunctional and uncanny, exposing the instability of design and the precarity of form. According to Briony Fer (2004), Orozco “disrupts the logic of utility and finality,” making visible the aesthetic potential of alteration and failure (p. 83).

For both artists, precarity is a productive condition—not simply a representation of social or economic instability, but a deliberate choice that allows for agility, subtlety, and critique. As art historian Jean Fisher (2001) argues, Alÿs’s and Orozco’s works resist the spectacle and instead “activate the politics of small gestures” that evade capture and commodification (p. 40). Their materials—ice, dust, air, bicycles, marbles—are often ephemeral or modest, resisting the monumental and pointing instead toward an ethics of attention and relation.

These practices resonate with broader discourses around artistic sustainability, site-specificity, and critical post-minimalism, where the ephemeral becomes a tool to question authorship, permanence, and value. They also align with feminist and decolonial strategies of working with what is available—an approach that refuses overproduction and reclaims minor forms as politically charged.

In Latin America, initiatives such as Taller Leñateros in Chiapas, Mexico, founded by poet Ambar Past, have turned indigenous and vernacular knowledge into editorial futures. The workshop recycles rags and local plants into handmade paper, hosting Mayan women artists and writers who publish books in their own languages. Similarly, collectives in Brazil such as Tramas Urbanas explore urban peripheries through creative engagement, using textiles, recycled materials and collaborative publishing to weave connections between popular knowledge, activism, and editorial experimentation.

In Asia, the work of Masami Igarashi, a Japanese inventor who transforms food waste into printable paper, gestures toward a post-organic materiality. Igarashi’s company, Kizuki Japan, has developed a “Food Paper” using leftover food waste such as citrus peels, potato skins, and onion skins, blending them with traditional fibers like kozo (mulberry) and hemp to produce a sustainable paper that maintains the qualities of traditional washi.

Similarly, the Kala Chaupal Trust in India and other cultural labs are exploring cow dung, banana fibers, and water hyacinths as sustainable materials for publishing, combining ecological awareness with creative innovation.

African collectives such as Chimurenga, based in Cape Town, exemplify a radical editorial practice rooted in remixed temporality, speculative resistance, and infrastructural improvisation. Their publications—often produced through hacked, repurposed, or locally-sourced means—are acts of cultural and material intervention. They reflect what anthropologist Achille Mbembe (2017) calls the aesthetics of repair: a political and creative project of mending and reassembling a fragmented world.

Such practices question the very categories of waste and value. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) described waste as “matter out of place,” but in the hands of these artists and publishers, waste becomes “matter with potential.” The design studio, when operating under constraints, transforms into an agent of remediation. Upcycling is not merely a solution—it is a poetics of the possible.

These practices challenge dominant notions of value, originality, and cleanliness. Yet, they are not without risk.

Publishing in the Wake of Things: Sharpe’s Ethics of Attention

Amid the many gestures of re-use, repair, and reconfiguration explored in precarious editorial practices, the work of Christina Sharpe (2016) helps us reframe these acts not only as creative strategies, but as ethical positions. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe introduces the concept of “the wake”—at once the turbulence left behind, a space of mourning, and a state of continued entanglement with histories of violence and loss. For Sharpe, to live and think “in the wake” is to remain attuned to what persists: the traces, absences, and unresolved conditions of historical trauma.

This orientation resonates with publishing practices that foreground residual materials, damaged archives, and broken timelines—not as obstacles, but as grounds for action. Like the artists who build from ice, dust, and discarded forms, Sharpe invites us to stay with what remains, not to resolve it, but to acknowledge and respond to it. What she calls “wake work” is a mode of attending: to damage, to silence, to survival.

In the context of publishing, this means approaching editorial labor as a form of witnessing and of care. It means allowing the fragmentary and the fragile to shape how stories are assembled and shared. Rather than striving for seamless narratives or polished surfaces, it encourages an aesthetics of incompletion and a politics of relation. In Sharpe’s terms, “the work is to make visible, to enact, to tend to” (p. 22).

Such an approach complicates the idea of upcycling as mere resourcefulness. It asks us to consider what kinds of histories are embedded in materials and what kinds of attention are required to work with them. It suggests that publishing is not just about producing new content, but about holding space for what has been excluded or erased—through design, through language, through structure.

In this light, to publish with what remains is also to publish in the wake: with a critical intimacy, a slowness, and a commitment to the unfinished. This ethic deepens the stakes of re-use—it connects the material to the historical, the aesthetic to the ethical. It reminds us that the act of making public is always also an act of care, and sometimes, of mourning.

Romanticizing Precarity? Critical Cautions

While the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of upcycling and precarious publishing can be powerful, several thinkers urge caution against their uncritical celebration. Sarah Brouillette (2014) argues that the valorization of resourcefulness under conditions of scarcity often reflects not resistance, but adaptation to neoliberal logic. Creative flexibility becomes a code for normalizing economic insecurity:

“The valorization of flexibility and resourcefulness in creative labor echoes too closely the very vocabulary used to normalize economic instability” (p. 76).

David Harvey (2005) similarly reminds us that resilience and improvisation, while necessary, should not distract from the structural causes of precarity. For Harvey, “to celebrate adaptation is sometimes to abandon critique.”

From a curatorial perspective, María Elena Ortiz (2019) warns against the fetishization of informality and the aestheticization of poverty in art from the Global South, which can flatten difference and reduce precarious conditions to a consumable visual language. Meanwhile, Tania Bruguera critiques artists who simulate precariousness or risk without actually confronting it in lived terms: “Risk is not a metaphor—it is the condition of making art” (Bruguera, c. 2015).

Cultural theorist Thomas Frank (1997) also shows how countercultural and “scrappy” aesthetics are often co-opted by the market, becoming marketing tropes rather than subversions. And Loretta Napoleoni (2013) identifies how minimalist, upcycled aesthetics can mask growing inequality by promoting scarcity as lifestyle choice rather than structural critique.

Reimagining Value with Awareness

These critiques do not negate the potential of publishing with what remains—they deepen its stakes. They remind us that aesthetic strategies must remain accountable to political, ethical, and material conditions. Upcycling is not inherently radical; it becomes so through intentional, situated practice. When connected to communities, histories, and solidarities, it can resist not only waste, but the logic that produces it.

To publish with and from what remains is to accept the brokenness of the world and still insist on beauty, meaning, and connection. But this insistence must remain vigilant—aware of its own frames, economies, and limitations. It is in this careful tension that publishing becomes not only a cultural gesture, but a form of slow repair.

This editorial approach also challenges dominant aesthetics. The clean lines and optimized formats of modernist publishing give way to textures, overlays, misalignments, and traces of former use. These are not defects, but evidence of life. As Alice Twemlow (2017) reminds us, critical design history must account for the messy, the broken, and the in-between. In this light, the recycled page becomes a relational surface—a carrier of previous meanings and an invitation for new ones.

Furthermore, these practices resonate with feminist and decolonial ethics of care, such as those articulated by María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), who reminds us that care is not clean or efficient—it is messy, slow, and embedded in material engagements. Publishing, then, becomes less about distribution and more about composition: the composing of relationships, histories, and futures through shared materials.

Within the DELLi (https://delli.pt/) programme and its constellation of artists, designers, and publishers, we see these ideas enacted. Initiatives such as Stolen Books’ use (https://stolenbooks.pt/) of leftover paper stock, or the student-led zine labs that turn risograph misprints into limited editions, reveal a politics of attention and reuse. These are not afterthoughts or compromises; they are editorial strategies that reimagine publishing as a cyclical, situated, and convivial practice.

In sum, the future of publishing may not lie in faster technologies or digital abstraction, but in the renewed intimacy between hand, surface, and material. To publish with and from what remains is to accept the brokenness of the world and still insist on beauty, meaning, and connection. It is to find, within scarcity, the resources of invention. And it is to reconfigure publishing as a continuous practice of care, listening, and making with what is already here.

---

References

Bachelard, G. (1983). Water and dreams: An essay on the imagination of matter (E. R. Farrell, Trans.). Dallas Institute. (Original work published 1942)

Bruguera, T. (2015). Various interviews and lectures. [Available through Tania Bruguera Studio].

Brouillette, S. (2014). Literature and the creative economy. Stanford University Press.

Buchloh, B. H. D. (2000). Gabriel Orozco: The sculpture of contingency. Artforum, 38(6), 124–129.

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge.

Fer, B. (2004). The infinite line: Re-making art after modernism. Yale University Press.

Fisher, J. (2001). Toward a metaphysics of shantytowns: The aesthetics of Francis Alÿs. In J. Fisher (Ed.), Interterritorial arts (pp. 35–44). INIVA.

Frank, T. (1997). The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. University of Chicago Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black reason (L. Dubois, Trans.). Duke University Press.

Medina, C. (1995). Mexico City: Between the limits. In F. Alÿs, Francis Alÿs: Re-enactments (pp. 21–28). Witte de With / ICA.

Napoleoni, L. (2013). Rogue economics: Capitalism’s new reality. Seven Stories Press.

Ortiz, M. E. (2019). Talk at Pérez Art Museum Miami. [Video and transcript].

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Twemlow, A. (2017). Sifting the trash: A history of design criticism. MIT Press.