Paper short abstract:

The cartonera publishing movement is reaffirming itself as a practice of resistance and permanence in these turbulent times. Transgressing the rules of capitalism and valuing collective production, the nuclei of cartoneros produce books as instruments of environmental and social regeneration.

Paper long abstract:

In 2003, Buenos Aires was still experiencing the side effects of the financial and social crisis that hit the country in 2001, leading to an explosion of the unemployment rate and social inequalities. Faced with this scenario of crisis, Eloisa Cartonera emerges as a result of occupations, demonstrations and protests, an editorial project that uses cardboard bought directly from waste picker cooperatives to make hand-painted book covers. Different people produce books from materials that would be discarded in the trash and that is integrated into the production cycle. Since then, the cartonero movement has developed rapidly across Latin America and the world and has become a symbol of resistance due to its original political and cultural characteristic. The cartonero universe brings together a multitude of participants, enabling the bond and the exchange of experiences that values the production and the affection generated in this process. It is an original way of publishing books as an instrument of resistance and subverting the devices of the publishing market. This work is aimed at presenting the collective Dulcinéia Catadora, a cartonera publisher created in 2007, in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, and at understanding this collective as a sympoietic practice that presents other ways of thinking and designing, by cultivating the response-ability , the ability to respond to contemporary social challenges, as well as the mechanisms it uses to break with the logic of neoliberal capitalist production.