Printers’ Speeches
festival
Printers' Speeches is a one-day festival dedicated to small printing machines and DIY printing. It takes place on Friday, October 11, at VROOM. The festival was organised in collaboration with Diego Thielemans.
Through workshops, lectures, and a concert, the festival explores the potential of the printing machine as an aestethic and political tool. In the morning, publisher and artist RAMSDAM (Maya Strobbe) will lead a playful workshop on Xerox printers. In the afternoon, there will be three lectures: art historian Iris Lafon will give examples of how photocopiers enabled feminist and queer subcultures to reclaim and reinvent their own images; programmer and designer Gijs de Heij will provide an overview of open-source solutions for graphic design; and artist Diego Thielemans will present his Colour Book, an experimental guide to color illustration in risograph printing. The festival will conclude with a musical program in collaboration with KRAAK, reflecting the day's themes.
By focusing on small printing machines and their specificities, the festival aims to stimulate creativity and collective production in an original way. It seeks to connect a network of individuals, unique expressions, ideas, tools, technologies, collectives, and engagements, promoting an alternative vision of culture.
The festival was possible with the support of the Commune of Anderlecht.
WORKSHOP
09:00-13:00
09:00-13:00
Impression Session
by Maya Strobbe
In this workshop, we’ll explore the simplest form of printmaking—stamps—by creating personal symbols that act as our visual signatures. Each participant will become a living stamp, using their chosen shape to form a shared alphabet that we’ll use in collaborative drawing sessions. Together, we’ll experiment with layering and combining these symbols to build unexpected visual narratives and explore the boundary between drawing and writing.
Maya Strobbe is a multidisciplinary artist navigating the intersection of drawing, graphic design, and bookmaking.
A significant aspect of Strobbe's practice is the creation of artists' publications under the alias RAMSDAM BOOKS. The publications exist within the gray area between artist's books, multiples, and zines. Typically, they are labor-intensive and meticulous endeavors. Recurring themes throughout RAMSDAM BOOKS' publishing catalog include drawing, collecting, everyday life, archives, rules, and games. The books often strive to adhere to a strong conceptual framework. When Maya publishes her own drawings, her focus lies in the pursuit of intriguing transformations, exploring the concept of regeneration through 'imperfect' reproduction.
In recent years, RAMSDAM BOOKS has dedicated more energy to publishing work by other artists active in the field of drawing, such as Linus Bonduelle and Sofie Vandevoorde.
LECTURES
15:00-18:00
(FREE)
15:00-18:00
(FREE)
How to queer your TV with a Xerox machine (15:00-16:00)
by Iris Lafon
Cinema and television have been more often than not instrumental in spreading harmful stereotypes and discourses about the LGBTQIA+ community. Can these toxic narratives be counteracted by a mimeograph or a Xerox copy? This talk will focus on the queer uses of small printing machines that helped shape complex and inventive alternative "moving images" to the dominant media.
Iris Lafon is a researcher in contemporary art history, specializing in the moving image. With Valérie Leclercq, she founded ladestructiondesespacesvides, a curatorial platform that combines visual, musical and para-academic research. Since 2021, they have been curating ‘Our Story’ the monthly LGBTQIA+ series of screenings and events of CINEMATEK.
Three stories of dismantling layout by OSP (16:00-17:00)
by Gijs de Heij and Ludi Loiseau
In our practice we solely use open source tools, for political reasons and because it allows us to cook layout in a much wider landscape of paths. In our talk, we'll present the stories of three objects we made, and how making them brought us in a more intimate relation with the languages and materiality of the technologies we use.
Open Source Publishing questions the influence and affordance of digital tools through its practice of (commissioned) graphic design, pedagogy and applied research. They prefer to use exclusively free and open source softwares (F/LOSS). Currently the group is composed of people with backgrounds in graphic design, typography and development. They find excitement in the cross- over between its members respective fields and competences. Legally OSP is structured as a bilingual Belgian non-profit organization (asbl/vzw) and aims to question and find alternatives to the standard graphic design studio model.
COLOUR BOOK – users guide (17:00-18:00)
by Diego Thielemans
The Colour Book is an experimental printing book that explores the superimposition of inks in risography. It features plates of colour variations, with information on how to reproduce them and apply them to illustrations. It's an invitation to experiment outside the CMYK model, and a visual poem that tells a story of colours, in colour.
Diego Thielemans (Brussels, 1989) is a visual artist engaged in practices of gleaning and classifying found materials. The resulting forms are printed materials, collages on various supports and videos. He is currently working as a guest artist at Chez Rosi (2021-2024), on The Glowing Part of Yourself - an animated collage in partnership with Atelier Graphoui and La Fonderie (2024 - ), as a lecturer at erg (2024-25), on Quest for Paradise - risographic fanzine (2024 - ). His work has been exhibited by amongst others Factatory (Lyon), VROOM, Nothing for Free, CIVA, Monokino, Rue du Chapeau 10, _(SIC) and Wiels Project Room.
PERFORMANCE
afternoon
afternoon
MMM si!
by Juan Pablo Plazas
This is how we hesitate in Spanish, Diego and me, yes we speak Spanish, between us. Mmm, I hesitated, I doubted if M.C. stands for microphone, because the person named M.C. often gets to hold the microphone longer than others in an event. Diego told me that it stands for Master of Ceremony, I told him that I didn’t want to be the Master of anything. I want more to be a stand-in, a temporary replacement for someone who’s about to come. I want to present the absence of who’s about to talk, I want the audience to desire the ideas of someone else, I want to give everyone the suspense of an intermediate act. When Diego asked me if I wanted to be the M.C., I said: MMM Sí!
Juan Pablo Plazas is an artist based in Brussels, Belgium since 2012. “I describe my activities as a sort of fortuitous ethnography that unveils itself through the manners of an art practice. This means that I’m constantly looking for the unexpected within the apparently obvious, the blatant certainty of the misunderstood and the wrong answers to the questions that no one ever asks.“
His work has been shown at SMAK, Gent, Belgium (2017), Mieke van Schaijk Galerie, ’s- Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands (2018), La Centrale, Brussels (2021 - 2022), CAC, Vilnius (2020) and Chauffeur Gallery in Sydney, Australia (2024).
CONCERT
20:00-22:00
20:00-22:00
PRINTERS/SCREECHERS
by Trio Truna (TX3) (ES) Sea San (DE)
Homemade instruments and far-out sounds moving past the installation room and into the concert hall ~ as a direct addendum to Vroom’s Printer’s Speeches, KRAAK invites two acts whose testament to human ingenuity knows no sonic boundaries! The primitive futurism meets its meta-human form in Dr Truna’s Trio Truna (TX3) and his self-built musical gadgetry, while Sea San’s motorized feedback experiments suspend reality in their hand-built percussive thresholds. A fine flourish to the fine print of this first Vroomer collab!
Trio Truna (TX3) (ES)
Hailing from the Valencian coast, the neo-renaissance figure that is the doctor known as Truna comes in many shapes, always involving sound contraptions of his own making that give a voice to his unique musical stylings. Known for collaborating with the likes of Pierre Bastien and Mike Cooper, Dr Truna proves himself to be one of his own key accomplices as he multiplies himself sonically and visually into a one-man avant garde orchestra with Trio Truna (TX3). In this configuration, his neo-dadaist musical inventions come to life for a full-on band experience voiced by inventions such as “cosmic bull”, “music stand from the future” and “cello & magical suitcase”. Baroque and futuristic expressions of kaleidoscopic anarchy is just what the doctor ordered for this trip.
Sea San (DE)
Cologne-based multidisciplinary artists Hye Young Sin and Sebastian Von Der Heide (aka Hipólito) started off collaborating as Jerome’s Dream, using the snare and other drum surfaces as springboards for motorized objects and electronic components to take off into abstract soundscapes. Under their new name Sea San, they lay the groundwork for an elastic sensory experience fuelled by home-cooked feedback and DIY robotics, opening new pathways into altered perceptive states of imagining.