Johanna Maierski is a publisher, lecturer, and printer from Berlin. In 2015 Maierski founded COLORAMA, a project initiative that explores publishing and printing as a collaborative & artistic practice, exhibiting and teaching worldwide. Since 2016 Maierski is hosting CLUBHOUSE together with Aisha Franz, a yearly comic residency program in Berlin. In 2020 they founded COLORAMA WORKSHOP together with Lauria Joan, an educational community space for printing and book-making amplifying people with marginalized perspectives
Small Press Publishing Tools
Pragmatic Poetic Sneaky Sticky
“Seated on wobbly folding chairs, crumbs of pretzels to my feet, a row of empty water and beer cans squeezed between empty suitcases, in a noisy room, across a criminally hot couple, I learned what VAT was, I learned how to calculate an artist fee, I learned how to open and clean a print body, and I learned that there was this one distributor I should avoid at all cost.”
— Johanna Maierski, Colorama Founder
Not Non-for-Profit: Publishing Strategies for Survival
„…not non-for-profit but profit-for-survival or profit-to-continue-our-work-without-other means-of-capital and most importantly to make money for others I publish, to create profit-for-labor.“ Genderfail, Manifesto – Profit for Survival, 2022
Be Oakley (Gender Fail) and Johanna Maierski (Colorama) discuss their respective publishing practices and strategies for continuing and contributing to the conversation about accessibility, representation and transparency in the small press community. Oakley will address their recent publication Publishing Now: GenderFail’s Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Self Publishing while Maierski will share their experience with the membership program and the Selfpublishing Summer School for people with marginalized perspectives.
Growing Collection of Publishing Tools
In a conversational writing session, participants share their special small press tools or the ones they wish they had. How one doesn’t reply to emails without feeling guilty, which paper sucks up Riso ink the best, or how to hack Word… tell us! The tools are filled into a template, printed on site, and added to the ever-growing Pragmatic Poetic Sneaky Sticky Reader – This reader is published by Colorama on the occasion of the Indiecon Festival and contains contributions by international publishers like Genderfail, Small Editions, TXTbooks, Dream Press and Small Tune Press.
Traditionally, small presses have been sharing knowledge and resources among themselves, among folded chairs, since the dawn of Art Book Fairs.
Colorama dedicates their Publishing Planet at Indiecon to exactly those publishing tools, the make-shifty and blurry, the pragmatic, poetic, sneaky, and sticky ones.
The Publishing Planet consists of a curated selection of international small presses committed to publishing as a collaborative and artistic practice, whose core values are resource sharing, self-organization, and merging poetics and research.
Additionally, the Pragmatic Poetic Sneaky Sticky Reader will be launched, a printed catalog produced and designed by Colorama, collecting publishing tool pamphlets from all small presses and presented at the Publishing Planet. During the fair, visitors and exhibitors can create and add their publishing tool pamphlets to a Riso-printing station, growing the Reader throughout the fair into a publication full of good and bad advice, personal tales and personal hells, connection, and wit.
