Publishing to find comrades: Kiosk Rotterdam

24 May, 2026

Kiosk Rotterdam is a bookshop, riso-print workshop, publisher (as Multi Tool Press), and social space/centre, run by one hard-working and caring person, Flip. The space is the dreamiest place I can imagine, with an amazing selection of books and zines at the specific intersection of radical/critical theory, politics, design, and self-publishing practices that I am interested in. At the same time, it’s a concrete and inspiring example of what’s possible, the kind of project I would love to build, and the need for this type of material and social infrastructure.

Last week, Kiosk hosted a book talk for Design Against Design, where I was in conversation with the incredible Clara Balaguer, who happens to live upstairs from the shop. It was a wide-ranging, rich, and challenging discussion——digging into questions of legibility, opacity and access, what we really mean by margins and centres, periphery and metropole, mass movements, institutionalization, insurrectionary politics/aesthetics——a conversation that genuinely pushed me further in my thinking. Thank you Clara.

The event was small and intimate, I hadn’t done much/any promotion, but amongst the people that gathered I was genuinely surprised by the level of mutuality. I know that the book is pretty niche, but even so I was in Rotterdam, outside my social circles, and it was so nice to discover so many connections. Clara herself is dear friends with Chris Lee, who was the friend who put me in touch with Freek/Set Margins’. I met a local organizer who was mobilizing an impressive boycott movement against Boiler Room and its parent company KKR in support of Wet’suwet’en land defenders back in “British Columbia”! I met a friend and long-time photographic collaborator of Danielle Aubert (who I had actually just met in person for the first time in Montreal!), author of The Detroit Printing Co-op. She had been living in Detroit for the last 25 years and only recently moved back to the Netherlands. Another person is friends with Allen’s Cruz in Montreal and Sarah Auches, my close friend who worked with LOKI in the summer of 2023. Sarah is interviewed in the book.

_{Hi Mom!!!}

After the event, Clara and I talked late into the night, the kind of conversation you can only have on a bench in the street in front of a venue, and she invited me upstairs to show me her amazing sticker collection and offer me tea.

The next day, Flip sent me off with a care package of books and prints. They had just printed a powerful poster depicting a scene from the current rail blockade at the port of Rotterdam. When I brought it to the friend I was visiting in Amsterdam a few days later, she couldn’t believe it as the action was literally still happening (and apparently successful).

Every launch for this book has been different and special in its own way, but this one really embodied its epigraph that now guides my current project: “One publishes to find comrades.” Density, strength, and reciprocity. Truly. Thanks again Clara, Flip, Skye, and everyone who attended!