Handmade Tales
The sustainability of small, local, do-it-yourself Latin American publishing collectives in the age of global capital
by Sarah Valdez

Like the planet we live on, the art market has become rather impracticably overheated of late. The big news of 2007 thus far: record-breaking auction prices; more than 250 privately chartered NetJets in and out of Basel during the course of a single week; Damien Hirst’s intentionally obnoxious, appropriately titled sculpture For the Love of God, the £50-million platinum human skull covered by 8,601 flawless diamonds, commemorated with ridiculously in-demand T-shirts, posters, and relatively inexpensive limited editions; and a globe-trotting pack of inbred connoisseurs complaining that there’s no new blood, that each fair looks like the last biennial, and that there’s not even enough blue-chip art left for the investment bankers to buy, anyway.

So, with the inevitable issue of sustainability in mind, perhaps there’s no time like the present to turn attention to certain small but not completely unknown Latin American publishing collectives—certainly no strangers to bubbles that have burst—that have been working against the odds to preserve their own cultures, remain independent, cooperate on a grassroots level, and make use of the scarce resources they have at hand. Financially, many of these groups are ever threatened with their own demise, buttressed against collapse only by the will and resourcefulness of the people who run them.

The innovative, seven-person Buenos Aires–based publishing group Eloísa Cartonera is one of the best known. The group operates in conjunction with the sad fact that tens of thousands of men, women, and children in South America—known in the region as cartoneros—make a living by scavenging and reselling cardboard found on the street. Eloísa Cartonera puts a twist on this already rather twisted economic system by buying cardboard from cartoneros at five times the going rate and utilizing it to make covers for literary books that one may or may not also think of as limited-edition artists’ books. All contain pages either run off on a copy machine or printed on a press donated by the Swiss Embassy, and the covers are hand-painted by artists using stencils, so that any given publication has a more or less uniform appearance.

Eloísa Cartonera, which prefers to keep the “Eloísa” part of its name a mystery, gelled in 2003, a little more than a year after Argentina’s economy abruptly collapsed in December 2001, causing the price of paper to shoot up...

Read more in the print edition>