Participants

Sophia Buck⁴; Pavel Arseniev⁵; Marina Simakova³; Boris Klushnikov¹; Isabel Jacobs²;  ¹ freelance, Germany;  ² Queen Mary University of London, UK;  ³ Turin University , Italy;  ⁴ Lady Margaret Hall, UK;  ⁵ Sorbonne, France

Discussion

The proposed presentation and discussion round concerns the new issue in translation by the left, formerly St-Petersburg based journal [Translit] (in Russian 2005–2023; only in translation since 2024). Set out as independent small press publishing and a literary and theoretical journal, it presented a community of artists, poets, philosophers and humanities scholars. After the last Russian issue in 2022, the majority of the editorial board moved into exile from Eastern to Central and Western Europe. The pertinent question then concerns the very status, function and agency of such publishing networks and this medium once uprooted and scattered due to military and political escalation.

The discussion and auto-testimonial reflections invite to think about printed matter in exile in two ways. For one, it concerns the continuation of independent press publishing as medium in exile and how this relocation or dispersal impacts editorial, communicational, and epistemic processes. For another, it concerns the very potential and role embedded in the medium of publication for those in exile, emigration or concerned with working on and thinking across divides. Instead of reducing a journal nowadays to the site for making (political) statements only – social media and blogs provide a much more contemporary form and speed of dissemination for that – the matter of printing issues as collective editorial task may explore outlooks of meaning making vis à vis conditions of relocation. Seen as an organizational framework, the crisis of migrating sense for publishers – allowing for re-mapping and re-negotiating intellectual, epistemic and theoretical networks – faces a variety of challenges:  the possibilities and limitations touch of going beyond self-archiving articulation, establishing (counter)archives, different and geographically depending moments of censorship.