“Workshops: Cardboard and the Material Sociality of Practice”

In this chapter, we highlight how the cartonera workshop as a fundamental form allows publishing collectives to reconfigure the social and cultural worlds they inhabit. We trace the ways the material transformation of cardboard, the artistic processes of stitching, decorating, and repurposing, enable cartoneras to create new communities of writers, publishers, artists, activists, and readers. We sketch the characteristics of cartonera workshops, situating them in the context of artist, activist, and artisan workshops in Latin America and beyond. We also focus on the material properties of cardboard itself and the way that cartoneras reform a material that is so often associated with a single form, the box. Taking discussions of workshops and materials beyond the European and humanist tradition, we argue that cartonera involves a material sociality of practice that goes beyond the human, assembling in the process expected materials like cardboard and unfamiliar materials like cochineal. Such communities, often seen by participants as utopic in a world of cut- throat commercial publishing, differ substantially from each other precisely because they are intensely responsive to the unique rhythms of their largely urban environments. By examining the connections and contrasts between cartonera workshops in our different field sites, we explore the different possibilities they open up for crafting community through collective manual and intellectual labor in timespaces that constitute forms of resistance to hegemonic modes of contemporary labor and sociality.