We’re delighted to announce our participation in this year’s It’s a Book symposium and fair, held at the HGB Leipzig on 29 March 2025. As part of the day’s program, our co-founder and artistic director Anna-Sophie Springer will present a performative reading titled ”These Endless – and Endlessly Necessary – Fantasies of the Library,” marking the tenth anniversary of the acclaimed first volume of the intercalations: paginated exhibitions series, Fantasies of the Library. Yes, it’s been that long...
it’s fragmentary, together, it’s a library
29 March 2025 | It’s a Book 2025 Symposium at Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
The symposium welcomes a range of guests whose work engages with the library as a space of speculation, transmission, and reorganization. Alongside Anna-Sophie Springer, contributors include Evelyn Wüthrich, Katrin Mayer, Maria L. Felixmüller, Philipp Neumann, and Raimar Oestreich.
This year’s theme centers on libraries as dynamic, ever-evolving spaces of collection, connection, and knowledge-making. We’ll explore how publications form part of larger networks—cultural, social, and architectural—and how libraries, both physical and digital, shape what is visible, what is preserved, and what is shared.
Join us in Leipzig to reflect on the future(s) of libraries and publishing.
Abstract
These Endless—and Endlessly Necessary—Fantasies of the Library
— a performative reading by Anna-Sophie Springer
The book and the library—two interwoven dimensions. If the book is a situation, a practice, a prismatic machine for the articulation of thought, then the library is an infrastructure of possibility, a liminal space where knowledge and imagination are continually arranged and rearranged, safeguarded and contested. In this performative reading of “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” (intercalations 1: Fantasies of the Library), I extend its reflections on bibliological apparatuses and architectures of writing… reading… and rewriting… into an expanded meditation on the library’s evolving, shape-shifting character.
In a world increasingly marked by epistemic instability—where archives are both erased and reconstructed, and access to information is both a site of struggle and overload—libraries persist as generative, heterotopic refuges. From the Mindcraft library built by Reporters Without Borders to outmaneuver censorship, to the bats in Portugal’s baroque libraries protecting rare books from insect decay, to guerrilla archivists salvaging climate data from state erasure, to virulent protests against the destruction of libraries—and bookshops—and the incarceration of their keepers—each example reveals the library’s enduring role in engaging, resisting, and re-imagining the conditions of knowledge. Here, the library is not just a place of preservation but an active, living practice: a site of negotiation between materiality and speculation, emancipation and proximity, the analog and the digital—one that requires our constant care, rewarding it with the emergence of new worlds.
[ Banner image: Thanks to Nina Prader @ladylibertypress, HBG Leipzig, 29 March 2025. Photo just above: Fantasies of the Library book launch at Printer Matter Inc. New York in April 2015, with Julia van Haaften David Senior, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Etienne Turpin. Photo by Emily Stoddart ]
The Symposium’s Program
1:00 PM
Welcome by Uwe Wellmann, Acting Chancellor of the HGB, and introduction by the It’s a book team …
1:15 PM
Reading
Katrin Mayer
Rose Intelligence
1:45 PM
Performative Reading
Anna-Sophie Springer
These Endless – and Endlessly Necessary – Fantasies of the Library
On the 10th anniversary of the first edition of Fantasies of the Library
2:30 PM
Lecture & Conversation
Maria L. Felixmüller
Productive Disorder – Between Books and Bookmarks
3:15 PM
Break
4:15 PM
Lecture
Raimar Oestreich
Public Libraries – Oases of Social Participation
5:00 PM
Short Lecture
Philipp Neumann
a mixtape: on libraries, archives, etc.
5:15 PM
Short Lecture
Evelyn Wüthrich
On the Library and the Material & Sample Archive of the Sitterwerk Foundation in St. Gallen
5:30 PM
Evelyn Wüthrich and Philipp Neumann in Conversation
For more information please go to itsabook.de/books