Straight Pins, Gauze, and Linotypes

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book,  the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.

Jessica Gordon-Burroughs - Assistant Professor (Spanish & Portuguese, Miami of Ohio). Professor Gordon-Burroughs received her Ph.D. and B.A. from Columbia University. Her research and teaching focuses on book and film materiality and media studies in Latin/o America. Gordon-Burroughs’ manuscript in preparation Visible Matter: Politics of the Copy, the Canon, and the Reader in Cuba, Venezuela, and Chile (1960-Present) reconstructs through period sources, critical essays, fiction, photography and film the hallowed, yet troubled, status of the State-sponsored book in Cuba, Chile, and Venezuela. She is currently researching the material (and im-material) lives of film objects in Latin/o American film archives.