Today we, as publishers, seek to collectivize our findings, link them, knead our techniques and processes so that they overflow, expanding their radius of action through accompaniments, more or less personal and yet alive, real or at least latent. We have the will to dismantle our practices in favor of a strengthening of differences, in search of a thousand different forms of editing; of all possible worlds.

Image by Mónica Mejía, production of La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán, published by Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee, Cali-New Orleans 2024.
It is no longer about the word. We do not seek to convince through that firmness because the word fixes the ideas and the gesture leaves them open to interpretation. In any case, neither the author nor the editor ever knows if the reader or spectator read the book they published, so we bet on the infiltration of languages and theories from other disciplines to search for mail-readings or score-texts or the phenomenology of the book as an exhibition space, as a sculptural piece. We turn our face away from the preeminence of the text, the preeminence of the eye, the preeminence of the object, the preeminence of the fetish, the conservation of things, to make way for the free experience of the entire body in obsolescent time and space, because everything, ultimately, is obsolescent. We deeply love the ambiguity of our publishing identity, which rather than fleeing from the commercial-industrial circuit, flees from the processes that wish to fossilize it, from the habits installed in each of the actors in the productive chain of the book, which we now also consider an affective chain. We take the book down from its pedestal and take it to live alongside the map, alongside the instructions, alongside the pamphlet, the graffiti, the poster, the leaflet, the manifesto, the vindication of an attack.
The reality of our projects implies—as has always happened with fragmentary projects—self-management and administration, oftentimes of the precariousness that forces us to do the most we can with the little we have, a precariousness that can be understood as a format, as the structure that involuntarily promotes new editorial shifts, future divergences of our work. In general, we do not “live from” our work, we “live for” our work. And behind this there is a reflection on pleasure without guilt.

Image by Gina Spitiani, La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán workshop. Collaboration between Casa Omedeto and Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee. Armenia, Colombia 2023.
We question our ways and those of others in our intimacy because we understood that our editorial projects are also bodies; we share tools, machines, time, drink and food because we are not just concepts. We do not speak through a coherently constructed editorial catalogue, we speak through every corner of our practice because our practice is our weapon and no practice is more or better than another in any case. We do not want to accumulate publications, we throw ourselves into the discovery of other editorial and publishing practices because editing a process as hard, as linear and hierarchical as the industrial editorial process is an example that everything, in reality, is prone to editing. And this is a major policy.
We do not understand radicality as the sharp end of our practices, but as a mobile and permeable border that adjusts each time we advance in the decomposition of our models. In this way, we all have different thresholds of radicality, thresholds that at some point will have to negotiate with other ways of understanding editorial practice and the world in general. We resist, we resist to cease to resist.
Finally, and perhaps in a more indolent way, we no longer even think in terms of books and publications. The game is no longer, and perhaps never was, about publishers, authors, content or readings; alongside this classic model of publishing there is now a broken shell from which laboratories, collectives, editorial workshops have been born, interventions, actions and gestures that are molecularly editorial and publicational, but which are the children of the plasticity of each mind and each practice involved in the projection, development, production, circulation and conservation of publications. At all these points there is a possibility of political expression. Publishing a manifesto is not the same as publishing as a manifesto. Our weapon is our practice.
This essay was published in Spanish by Casa del Tiempo, number 5 October-November 2022. Cultural magazine of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.
E Tonatiuh Trejo. Graphic communicator from the Faculty of Art and Design at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is founder, editor and designer of the Editorial Laboratory Esto Es Un Libro. He has collaborated in magazines such as Perros del alba, RegistroMX, CinePremier and Revista404. He was editor of the magazine Sensacional de Cineastas and founding partner of the Refud bookstore. www.estoesunlibro.com
Mónica Mejía, from Cali – Colombia, has been collaborating with the artisanal publishing collective Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee since 2015. She works at Antenna, a literary and visual arts organization in New Orleans, coordinating Antenna Press, and Paper Machine, Antenna’s print shop, book bindery and community space.