P_____ublishing house for handbooks

Publishing house for handbooks

The Publishing House for Handbooks was founded in Stuttgart in 2014 with the aim to investigate mechanisms of change. It is likely that the place – a city of engineers, stronghold of the techno-fetish and protestant ethics was more prone to trigger the appearance of a publishing house around the genre of the handbook. Surrounded by the ever present call for efficiency and the prerogative of a compulsive realpolitik the publishing house started to test how things work (out), analyse the promise of the functional and the strategies of its enforcement.

Our authors are artists, that through their singular expertise confront the rhetorics of the handbook. Up until now eleven handbooks have been published in two collections (organon 1 and 2). Furthermore we interpret handbooks as scripts for a Theatre of Operationality and collect existing handbooks in Safe Operations.

The contemporarily most ubiquitous instance of the handbook is the instruction manual. It lacks both a price tag and an author. Public libraries do not collect it and the question of design is mostly neglected. Literary morphology assigns it (if at all) a place at the fringes of nonfiction among reportages, scientific and bureaucratic texts.

The instruction manual claims that things work out. Its inherent truth claim on what a thing is is naturalized to such an extent, that it governs the realm of sense-certainty almost unchallenged and thus informs our interaction with objects. The task of the Publishing House for Handbooks then must be to question this claim, liberate sense-certainty and set up an experimental fermentation lab for the recipes of the future.

Anna Schiefer

Anna was born in Moscow where he grew up on a military base. In the October youth she gave an oath to defend the revolution. She is trying to live up to this promise by publishing handbooks. In the publishing house Anna feels responsible for the uncovering of new fields of activities. Outside of publishing Anna works with lecture performances and theatrical installations. Since 2017 she is artist-researcher in the program ‚Document et Art Contemporain‘ an der École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image in Angoulême & Poitiers in Frankreich.
_____ annaromanenko(at)verlagfuerhandbuecher.de

Björn Kühn

Björn grew up in the pseudo-arcadia of the Odenwald. Soon he realized choice of professions is far to akin to the Freudian choice of neuroses. Even though he did not yet know those terms. He became an artist to escape the blackmail of “your life for your labour power” only to later find out that it was precisely the art field where new work forms of exploitation were tested. In the publishing house he is concerned with the transformation of the possible into the necessary. Currently Björn is working on a theory of ergonomics as an aesthetics of capitalism.
_____ bjoernkuehn(at)verlagfuerhandbuecher.de

Sara Cristina Moser

Sara Cristina was born in Wiesbaden. She is responsible for the overall appearance of the publications and deals with the transportation of content into the conceptual framework of the handbook. She holds a diploma in communication design from the State Akademy of Fine Arst Stuttgart. In 2018 Sara founded her own Studio in Berlin:
Studio Sara Cristina Moser
_____ saracristinamoser(at)verlagfuerhandbuecher.de

Kontakt

things(at)verlagfuerhandbuecher.de

V_____erlag für Handbücher
Schiefer und Kühn GbR
Alexanderstr. 12A
70184 Stuttgart