TITLE NARRATIVE

Beyond Repair began in early 2015. A years long, neighborhood based platform, no matter its activities, Beyond Repair’s aim is to move past the rhetoric of “people and places that need fixing” so that a neighborhood might work towards spaces of care, mutuality, and sustained support. Made up of long-term “social tools” (structures of seeing and cooperative creation) and one-off projects, events, programs, and publications, Beyond Repair seeds the landscape through the distribution of an idea across time and place.

In 2016 Transmission was conceived, a book shop and publishing site located in the bustling Midtown Global Market, a public market located in the epicenter of South Minneapolis’s 9th Ward. All the books within the shop were produced in house in collaboration with writers, academics, activists, poets, artists, and others around the world, as well as with neighbors, who bring with them the wealth of histories and ideals present within the surrounding neighborhood. It was a responsive site, with tools on hand to add material history through print to the constant churn of life in the neighborhood. Transmission looked very much like a print shop / books store. And that’s good, as we love books and the power and vitality of the book in creating bonds between people. But the concept of the project moves well beyond the physical boundaries of the page. Transmission saw publication as the act of public-making. Publication doesn’t begin with an object, a noun, but with the space in-between bodies, between people. Publication is a verb, an action. Through the actions of people reading, sharing, creating, seeing one another - and sometimes that most certainly includes the creation of printed materials - publication is enacted.

With these ideas in mind, publication at Transmission started by entering the space and offering one’s self up to the possibilities of neighbors working, talking, and creating a future neighborhood together. The project used the model and familiar framework of a shop within a marketplace to ask questions of one another - for instance, about the nature and qualities of exchange - and move those shared questions out into the neighborhood to see if they might transform into shared desires to act upon and cycle back again.

COMMENTARY

“What’s going on here?” It’s a question that Sam Gould, founder of Beyond Repair, invariably gets when people enter the painted-plywood booth in the Midtown Global Market. And it’s a question that Gould asks of himself, and others, constantly.

At first glance, Beyond Repair appears to be a bookstore or print center nestled between a taco shop, an Indian fusion restaurant, and a microbrewery in Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market. Paperback books, booklets, and text-based posters bearing mantras like “RESISTANCE IS POSSIBLE” line the shelves of the booth. A monolithic digital printer symbolically occupies the center of the stall. Along one wall, a hand-built table filled with projects and papers creates a natural conversation space. The printed material is for sale, but at Beyond Repair the exchange of inked paper is secondary to the exchange of ideas..."

Article on Beyond Repair's shop, Transmission, published in the Walker Art Center magazine, written by Haley Ryan.

April 1st, 2016

An excerpt from Risa Puleo's interview with Sam Gould in Hyperallergic about the making of Sgt. Kroll Goes to the Office. The project was conceptualized in Transmission after Gould received a copy of a decades old police interrogation overseen by Bob Kroll, the president of the Minneapolis Police Federation. With the help of Tom Kaczynski, Gould gathered 19 comics illustrators for a “book sprint.” More info on the project, Sgt. Kroll Goes to the Office, can be seen here. Visit Hyperallergic for Puleo's article in its entirety.

Kroll: First, you have the right to remain silent.

Otis: What does that mean?

Kroll: Why don’t you take your hands away from your mouth for me and sit up there and talk like a man.

Otis: Okay?

Kroll: You have the right to remain silent. Do you know what that means?

Otis: No.

Kroll: Do you know what … what … what word there? There’s “you” “have” “the” “right” “to” “remain” “silent.” Is there one word you don’t understand in those seven?

Otis: What? I don’t know?

Kroll: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT … okay, what grade are you in?

The first 10 of the 32-page illustrated transcript of Minneapolis Police Department Sergeant Bob Kroll’s interrogation of Otis, a 14-year-old black child, continue in a manner that is simultaneously berating and confounding. Otis was in the eighth grade when he was arrested in 1996 for riding in a stolen car in Minneapolis. He maintained his innocence despite Kroll’s repeated attempts to extract a confession from him using the Reid technique, an archaic set of interrogation methods contested by ACLU and American Bar Association for producing false confessions, especially in children. Currently, Bob Kroll (now a Lieutenant) is the controversial union president of the Minneapolis Police Federation, who has admonished the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Philando Castile’s fatal shooting by a police officer of St. Anthony, Minnesota, in June of 2016 and Jamar Clark’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis PD officer in November of 2015.

In August the complete transcript of Otis’s interrogation was anonymously delivered to Beyond Repair, a bookstore and independent publishing house run by the artist Sam Gould(...)

DOCUMENTS

Buildout at the shop begins in the fall of 2015 with a committed group of friends and neighbors.

Some early examples of printed matter edited, designed, and printed at Transmission.

The shop was a site for browsing, purchasing, exchanges, both monetary and conversational. The role between producer and consumer was, by design, incredibly ill-defined.

At Transmission we made the attempt to illustrate that "publication" was a process that revealed itself as readily as when individuals or groups sat around the shops table as when a book was produced and handed to someone. The shop itself - its tools of production, its signage, its constant motion and state of "disarray" playing an integral role in understanding where one was "at" in relation to the larger market space and the neighborhood at large.

COLOPHON

Editor: Sam Gould

Collaborators: John Kim, Marlon James, Bruce Braun, Nate Young, Sarah Pedersen, Alya Ansari, Rachel Hiltsley Sun Yung Shin, Mary Austin Speaker, Chris Martin, Crystal Quinn, Emory Douglas, Alexa Horochowski, Derek Maxwell, Alex Pears, Dan S. Wang, Alexander Haeg, Jonathan Herrera, Morgan Adamson, Charmaine Chau, Patrick Kiley, Chaun Webster, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, Arrington de Dionyso, Duaba Unenra, and many many others known and unknown.

Timeframe: October 2015 - April 2018