April 2005 - ongoing

Kingston Ontario, Canada

The Kingston Public is a portable lending library of anecdotes, images, details, affects and other miscellanea gathered from members of the Kingston community. The creation of a lending library as a forum for the community's personal anecdotes, slogans, artefacts, histories and the vital themes that underlie them is an exercise of group self-examination, development and affirmation. The appropriation of such institutional practices to endorse our personal narratives at once maintains those practices and parodies them. It banks upon their credence to lend our voices an aura of worth but also criticizes those practices as not representing the local ethos and of investing too heavily in the myth of the professional as the only reliable conduit of truth. Through this work, we hope to question the power relations of the expert/audience binary and to inspire extra-institutional alternatives to this system.

Contact Information:

Lindsay Fisher
lindsay.elfish@gmail.com
Vincent Perez
vinceisdead@hotmail.com