Smudged Soil

Hocus Bogus Publishing/Roodkapje Rotterdam


13 Euro

Kicking off the 2022 Hamburger Community Residency program, artist Dennis Muñoz Espadiña has led the new residents through a month-long-get-your-hands-dirty program to explore the materiality, performability and smudginess of RISO printing and small press publishing. Drawing inspiration from Helena Grande’s poetry pamphlet Night Soil, as well as the street-walk rubbings of artist Sari Dienes, the mentorship of Muñoz Espadiña has taken an unorthodox approach to the usual pre-press and computer editing process connected to digital stencil duplication.

Night Soil is an old euphemism for poop. A term that refers to how excrements were collected at night before the sewage system was created. At night, when everybody was sleeping, cleaners collected and transported human waste to hidden places. People woke up to a tidy city, except cleaners who were relegated to stay away from society because they were all night in touch with the collective dirt.

The mentorship is an experiment to build a bridge between the practice of printing and publishing, and these above-mentioned, hidden places where our collective waste is collected; giving leeway to the residents to explore and deconstruct the processes of printed matter through/with their bodies rather than their minds. As the title of this project conspicuously states: we favor dirty hands; scrunched up paper; broken nails; smudged fingertips; bruised arms; torn edges and sweat drenched clothes to save us from the tyranny of neatly stacked piles of crisp white paper.

Includes 2 poems by writer Helena Grande with a collage poster by Dennis Muñoz Espadiña.

Stapled with elastic cord for insert
2022
Edition of 150
28 pages A5
1-6 color RISO printed on 100gr Biotop paper Insert printed on 120 gr Anarchy Red by Metapaper