DISPOZITIV BOOKS

EXPANDING PUBLISHING PRACTICES IN BUCHAREST

Kajet Journal is expanding! This time last year we were opening our little bookshop in the city centre of Bucharest, called Dispozitiv Books, a physical space situated within a 5-minute walk from Cișmigiu Park. Now we have a website and online bookshop: https://dispozitivbooks.com/

This has given us the opportunity to bring independent magazines, art books, fiction and non-fiction titles, ranging from fashion, contemporary art, politics, society and technology, sports, cinema and filmmaking, food and drinks, identity politics, architecture and design, culture and anthropology, as well as contemporary literature, to a wider audience—titles that we have found inspiring and provocative, gripping and revolutionary during harder times than usual. For the time being, the bookshop operates online and ships only in Romania.

Besides operating as a bookshop, Dispozitiv is also a publishing studio that seeks to carve out new meanings to the relationship between theory and image, between the experiences of the past and the possibilities of the future. Besides publishing Kajet, Dispozitiv has published two other books: “Imagined Exchanges”, a collaborative project between twelve artists, curators, activists, all assigned with a burdening task: to re-map the Eastern European condition in the context of three decades of post-socialist capitalism; the book exists in the form of deconstructed thoughts that were produced following a speculative process fuelled by imagination, their solutions are reframed in the context of a round table discussion that never happened; the other is “Camera Arhiva”, the editorial counterpart of the digital archival platform with the same name, that seeks to unearth Romanian printed matter published between 1947 and 1989. Functioning as a research platform that is a permanent work in progress, Camera Arhiva retrieves material traces of communist everyday life, such as almanacs and journals, state periodicals and union-owned magazines, newspapers and pamphlets, posters and exhibition catalogues, paperbacks and do-it-yourself manuals.

Cover Image: Nikita Dembinski (@uxbalt)
www.dispozitivbooks.com
www.cameraarhiva.com
www.kajetjournal.com