Who we are
Paréntesis is a collaborative publishing project created by Camilo Baquero.
What we do
We use artistic strategies to link unpublished writers and non-writers with traditional editorial circuits and bookstores.
For that purpose, we invite people from all over the world to share literary texts no longer than one DIN-A4 page (short stories, poems, literary essays, fragments of longer texts, among others) to be printed and hidden in bookstores around the world inside books of their choice.
How we do it
We work with a network of collaborators in different parts of the world (some key points at the moment are Accra, Berlin, Bogota, New York and Tokyo). We send them the texts, already lay-outed in a standard-sized booklet, and they print them and hide them inside books chosen by the authors.
Why is the format standard?
We want the texts to be easy to produce and reproduce by the collaborators, with a very low cost and without depending on great technical knowledge.
How is it collaborative?
The publication only exists through the collaboration where readers are also included: we invite them to read the texts and then re-hide them in a new bookstore. Without the collaboration, the texts would simply stop circulating.
Why is it collaborative?
We believe that publishing in a collaborative way creates spaces of conversation about the publishing practice itself, but also enhance the interest in creative processes and foremost the politics behind them. The big potential is inviting to create a community of people that assumes responsibility for what they do and how they do it.
What we pursuit
- We seek to create an alternative archive of literature that circulates hidden among the conventional publishing circuits always waiting to be discovered.
- We seek to create alternative points of contact between unpublished authors and potential readers.
- We seek to open new reading paths for those who find the texts.
- We seek to create literary dialogues between unpublished and published authors.
Why we do it
We want to create spaces for people who, in one way or another, have been excluded from publishing circles or have experienced some kind of oppression in this regard.
Some relevant aspects to this regard are:
- Misinformation or lack of information about publishing possibilities, especially for young people who have no contacts within publishing circuits or knowledge about their processes. That is to say: there is a lot of hermeticism on the part of traditional and even independent publishing houses.
- There are people whose work, contents or formats are considered alternative or not very commercial and therefore are not published.
- There are people who have even no interest in publishing through traditional ways.
- There are also less spoken but legit reasons, like different kind of personalities or states of mental health that do not always fit with the conventional selections processes and protocols of publishing practices: writers or non-writers who simply don’t want to expose themselves or their work in unsafe spaces.
How do we choose the authors to be published?
In Paréntesis the selection process is simple and seeks to eliminate some of the aforementioned barriers. We open the door to people in the world who think of themselves as unpublished writers or non-writers, without asking any further questions. We believe that this approach helps from the beginning to create a network of trust that is more comfortable and safe for those who want to show their work.
Are the publications available outside the spots where they’re dropped?
No. We are not interested in a wide diffusion, but in the coincidental and personal encounter of the readers with the texts and the authors. Paréntesis is not so much about the scale, but about what happens in each human being at the very moment in which they find the texts and appropriate them before putting them back into circulation.
