Press Press (est. 2014) is an interdisciplinary publishing initiative based in a storefront studio & library in Downtown Baltimore. Press Press’s publishing practice is organized around two key goals; to shift and complicate the aesthetic and understanding of difference, primarily focusing on immigration and race in the United States; and to build meaningful networks of relationships through publishing practices centered on self-representation and gathering. Press Press’s work pushes for a culture that values the lives, minds, and voices of identities of difference, while building a supportive community that enables us to always thrive.  

History
 
In 2014, Kimi Hanauer started a residency with Refugee Youth Project by holding creative writing workshops with a group of teens in Catonsville, Maryland. When starting to publish collaborative works, the group realized they needed to give the initiative a name, and so Press Press was born. Since then, we have broadened our activities beyond the after-school program. However, the after-school workshops have continued to be a large thread of our practice as we carry the principles the program was initiated within throughout all of our work: embracing collaboration, self-representation, and difference.
 
WHAT WE DO
 
With a focus on immigrant and refugee experiences, Press Press's practice fosters a collaborative network of relationships and surfaces the narratives of Baltimore-based communities. Through an understanding of publishing as the act of gathering a public, Press Press’s streams of work include hosting after-school publishing workshops for refugee teens in an immigrant and refugee only space, public educational and cultural programming, an open-access publishing shop that’s based on an exchange economy, and the on-going production of print and digital publications.
 
The Library
 
The Press Press library is a collection of resources and publications that were recommended and thematically organized by more than 35 individuals, collectives, and organizations throughout 2016-2017, who each selected a range of resources they deemed most essential their own livelihoods. While the collection was heavily created through a local contingency, it also works in conversation with a national network of artist-organized initiatives. The Library presents a syllabus of texts relevant to artist organizing, independent publishing, social justice, racial equity, and feminism, which influence currently active artists and organizers, both nationally and locally to Baltimore, and informs Press Press’s on-going programs. Located in Press Press’s storefront, the library was created as a way of collectively molding the culture of the space, holding Press Press’s work accountable to it’s context, and building on our approach to public making as the facilitation of a set of relationships.
 
Afterschool Program
 
Through a partnership with Refugee Youth Project since 2014, Press Press hosts publishing workshops with teen refugees in an immigrant and refugee only space. In our program, individual dialects, accents, and expanded modes of communication are embraced, as students are not pressured to assimilate into American cultural and linguistic norms. Our program was created for and by second-language speakers and is based on an understanding of language as a vessel that shapes our own identities and the ways in which we navigate the world around us. As second language speakers, we understand our use of the English language as both a personal and political act.
 
Exchange Economy
 
With Press Press’s Exchange Economy (EE), anyone can learn how to self-publishing their work in our studio, in exchange for any contribution to the broader project. Through the use of time-banking, EE cultivates new programs, resources, workshops, and relationships in our storefront space, while building a community of new and experienced independent publishers. Participants only pay for the use of materials at cost and can choose to participate in one-on-one learning with a member of our team during our weekly open hours.
 
Publications
 
We publish a range of print and digital publications on an on-going basis that give form to our programmatic and ethereal practice. Our collaborative process often takes upwards of a year to complete one publication and emphasizes social gathering as a primary mode of the work. Our publications vary widely in form, although we are keen to manifestos, conversations, specific artist projects, and gatherings.

Paradise Now is a game of unequal circumstances and varying objectives that invites unlocked players to alter and redefine the game’s Score by participating in various rounds of the game. The Score is a series of directive actions that happen over each 60 minute round of the game. Unlocked players may alter the Score by navigating the space with their bodily movements, altering the various gaming mechanism at play, and by adding directive phrases to its structure. Although many players may be active in the game simultaneously, every player may choose to fill the role of player 1 or player 2 and respond accordingly to their set of directive actions in the Score throughout each round played. Each round of the game played throughout its occupation of Stamp Gallery in September & October of 2016 will be documented, archived and analyzed by our team, who will compose an accumulative Score.

lian tsai, a Taiwanese national living in the U.S. since 2008, found obtaining even one of these administrative positions next to impossible after graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in May 2015. In September, Tsai moved into the collectively run, live/work project space penthouse gallery without plans for how to handle her quickly approaching October 1st deadline.

After a series of conversations between Tsai and kimi hanauer(a member of the Penthouse collective), the two settled on a curatorial project that would have Penthouse Gallery hire Tsai as its new Gallery Manager. Hanauer wrote a letter of hire for Tsai’s visa agent and the two quickly received notice that Tsai’s visa had been extended by one full year. As part of the contract the two wrote in this project, one of Tsai’s initial responsibilities was to organize Penthouse’s October opening. “Penthouse Gallery Presents: Lian Tsai,” documented the visa process, celebrated Tsai’s newly acquired OPT visa, and recorded the occasion of her continued residency in the United States through a durational performance performed by Tsai." - Colin Alexander for Post Office Arts Journal 

Read the full conversation between Kimi + Lian here. 

The following is a collection of documents gathered over the period of two weeks leading up to MICA’s 2015 annual school-wide commencement show which emerged during the time of the Baltimore Uprising. 

Every year, approximately two weeks before the commencement show opens to the public, huge piles of detached walls start showing up all over campus. These are the walls MICA uses to transform our metal shops, our classrooms, our studios and wood shops into traditional exhibition spaces. When audiences flood the show, the white walls attempt to lead them to disregard what actually goes on here, the daily work, discussion and upkeep of these classroom and work spaces. I am not convinced, however, that they actually succeed at hiding the reality of these spaces. As students, we know these spaces intimately, we know how they are used on the daily, we know their sounds and their smells. I suppose there are just some things that are beyond MICA’s control and much beyond MICA’s attempts at hiding. This theme of attempting disguise, is one that I have witnessed or clashed with on a few occasions over my past four years at MICA, specifically regarding MICA’s relationship with and navigation of its context: Baltimore City.

Powerful institutions, such as major news outlets or universities, too often reject the possibility that most, if not all facets of our world, ultimately stem from a contradiction of varying truths. These are the institutions that publish the catalogues, that write the histories and that exhibit the findings. In order to claim their knowledge and stability, these institutions must hide their own uncertainties and find a way of maintaining their conditional inability to control the variables which make up our world. The commencement show and its walls is just one example of MICA’s presentation of its institutional unity and stability, a disguise in itself, which inherently must disregard the paradoxes and unethical relations that define MICA, its students, faculty and staff and our relationship to the context we are based in.

This project emerged out of the need to acknowledge the context MICA's Commencement Exhibition existed in. The few documents collected in this space, which represent the two weeks surrounding Commencement, could not nearly approach the long history of systemic violence that structures this city. A violence that subsequently defines MICA’s existence and is defined and structured by MICA’s existence (whether MICA visibly acknowledges this or not). Visibility is exactly the point here. I could not possibly capture all of the facts, all of the documents, all of the efforts and beautiful moments of those two weeks, not to mention the past hundreds of years. This was not an attempt at formulating some sort of concrete conclusion or resolution. It was an attempt at surfacing one of the most important facets of any work or entity: its context. A context which MICA often works to disguise, or exist despite of. I felt it necessary that 2015's commencement catalogue be about a visibility which rejects the disguise and embraces the uncertainty and paradoxical relationships that make up this place.

In the headquarters, visitors were invited to participate in the making of the catalogue, by adding information to the archive which got bound into the publication. 

Check out the on-going archive here.
Alloverstreet’s structure is based on two significant values:

1. Alloverstreet is democratically curated. Any art space, collective or individual who wishes to be involved is welcome.
2. Alloverstreet is collectively run. Participating spaces collectively control the development of the project.

This rhizomatic structure, in which no one entity may entirely control the direction of the project, has developed through years of dialogical-democratic engagement between consistent participators and continues through monthly project meetings. As part of these project meetings, where participating spaces discuss the project and its development, SNAE, inc. also hosts professional development workshops with visiting artists and professionals that are based on participators needs and desires. Alloverstreet attempts to unite different audiences and works to broaden the scope and reach of independently run art spaces. Learn more about Alloverstreet’s methodology here.

Sentiments is a compilation of the sensitivities, hacks, gestures, and actions that we, as immigrants, have used to bring our lives into being. It serves as a tool kit for sanctuary-building and -keeping, self-determination, and resistance, that takes the form of a series of ongoing conversations, gatherings, and collaborations throughout 2017-2018, that will culminate in a publication and exhibition in Summer 2018 taking place in Baltimore, Maryland. Sentiments is a project produced in three interrelated parts; part one surfaces the narratives of immigrants through a series of personal interviews; part two documents a series of mother-daughter and familial collaborations or conversations; and part three features a collectively-built manifesto for sanctuary-building & -keeping. With an emphasis on femme immigrant identities, Sentiments features individuals and families in Baltimore and beyond, and aims to build empathetic space around difference by addressing the intersections of various immigrant experiences and embracing our power through collective and collaborative work.

A Manifesto For Sanctuary-Keeping & -Building

This manifesto emerges at a time where the ongoing targeting of immigrant communities and the violation of human rights continues: the recent ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the refugee crisis across the globe, mass deportations, and the unfortunately all-too-familiar misconduct of institutional bodies. Within this context, sanctuary has a multiplicity of meanings. For undocumented immigrants, it might mean a sanctuary city like Baltimore, where authorities do not report on the legal status of its residents; or the simple right of not being forcefully removed from home. For refugee families, who undergo years of applications, travel, and more, it might mean finally arriving at place where physical safety is seemingly more possible than before. And for many others, it might mean having the possibility of living in a place where fear of alienation, physical harm, or otherwise, is not a daily risk because of one’s cultural or religious practices; and instead, individuals’ and communities’ practices are seen as rich and admirable contributions to society. Through an interrogation of the notion of sanctuary,this manifesto collects and affirms the expertise of various immigrant experiences in building, maintaining, imagining, fighting for, and demanding sanctuary, thus defining what it can be.

*Images by Yunique Palmer Saafir