Mara K: Indie Librarian for the People

Mara K. is an artist, media- and biblio-trashologist and one of my oldest friends in Berlin. We met while taking german classes back in the day. Since I’ve known her, she has been obsessed with learning in general, and with books, libraries, library resources, languages, and art more specifically. She is also a musician, dj, and just an all-around lovely human full of knowledge!

Mara’s upcoming class Libraries: Ultimate Open-Source taking place in Berlin next month, is a culmination of all her passions coming together and we are more than thrilled for the opportunity to explore them with her. 

Can you talk a little bit about your background? How did you come to have a love of books, art and libraries?

I was born in the 1970s in Philadelphia, USA. Both my parents—and the majority of their circle—were reporters for the city’s tabloid, The Daily News. So while we always had books, magazines, newspapers, TVs and radios around, it was a lot more wisecracking than wise. I mean, there was an absolute love of stories in my home but it was really un-academic. 

Part of being in the media world at that time also meant you got sent all sorts of advance copies of things. My folks would just bring me and my brother home junk from the newsroom—hardback books with the corner of the dust jacket snipped off or cassette tapes with holes drilled in the cases (meaning they were publicity copies that couldn’t be re-sold). 

So at an early age I got addicted to always having print media input. I was subscribed to a bazillion magazines, too, which, along with all of yesterday’s newspapers, I spent a good deal of my teens cutting up, collaging and paper-mache-ing. All of them except for National Geographic, of course, that was the one mag that for some reason was taboo to cut. 

I remember when I was a pre-teen around 1988, Kitty, a tough-as-nails mafia reporter friend of my parents—who also happened to be an artist—took me to New York City for the first time. We ended up in some gallery downtown that had its showroom on the second floor. I just thought this was the coolest thing. And then the art … I’m pretty sure it was Cy Twombly. Giant canvases covered with un-hinged scribbles. I was hooked. 

A painting by Cy Twombly

As for libraries, they came later when I flew out of the nest. Living on my own in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and later Madrid and Berlin, I suppose I went to them looking for a “fix,” but also for sanctuary, for a feeling of home.  

What is the Night Library and how did it come about?

It was conceived late one summer night in Kreuzberg while the Euro-hordes outside my window were making tons of noise and clinking beer bottles. All I wanted was a silent room to read and think at night, with no social pressures to drink, smoke, or share my thoughts with anyone. This eventually morphed into the cross-section of ideas, research methods, physical collections and artworks that I call The Night Library.

Though I’m often changing my mind, I’ve said that the mission of The Night Library is to "rewild knowledge acquisition.” With this in mind over the years I’ve set up various art installations—and produced accompanying 'zines and poetic catalogs—giving people a space in which to be alone and distraction-free with the reading material from my collections. The hope is that they take the chance to contemplate that, while there is obvious censorship out there, we in the so-called free world also need to contend with the self-editing and self-policing that comes with living so much of our lives on the internet.

The Night Library is also simply an archive of the images, books and ephemera I collect and come across in Berlin and my travels abroad, as well as digitally and in the Public Domain. I like to call this practice “Media- and Biblio-Trashology.” I sometimes post from my archive on my website, on Instagram and on Flickr.

One thing I super love about you is that your brain seems to have a grasp on all esoteric topics!  For example, in your work with the Night Library you have put together collections of books with super interesting topics that at first glance don’t necessarily go together. How did this skill actually come about? Is it something anyone can learn or only the lucky few?

I really think that almost anything can be learned. I am against the idea that any human is “born” with certain abilities. The concept of talent is a damaging myth that discourages us from taking advantage of the astonishing capacity that ALL of us have. 

For example it can frustrate me when I hear otherwise well-positioned and capable humans say things like “I have a terrible memory,” “I can’t cook,” or “I suck at languages.” There are strategies for improving all these abilities—or finding your own special love for them—a lot of which you can get from books at the library! Of course you’re going to have to put a bit of your own oomph, and a few hours of concentration into it. There’s no way yet to download a language to your brain’s hard drive. But we’re not computers, and there are kooky connections that we can make that I think  are really the definition of being human. 

Book I got from a flea market that’s really helpful for boning up your memory

Also living in a capitalist and patriarchal society, many of us think we have to pay for a fancy school to teach us, or pass some sort of test, or kill ourselves studying in ways we find completely uninteresting, to prove to others or ourselves that we know something. That is what I love about the library: you get so much more return on your enjoyable efforts, and it’s 100% free! 

I think of that scene in “Good Will Hunting” where the high school dropout-genius played by Matt Damon says to this Harvard asswipe something like, “one day you’ll wake up and realize you wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

I believe that every time we humans exercise a new mental muscle or forge a neural pathway, the universe of our mind expands. But unlike a computer, we actually have unlimited storage capacity! The challenge is just retrieval. So perhaps that is the skill that I have developed that I also think can be learned by anyone: The art of retrieval. For me this means letting myself go down potentially unfamiliar roads—where I might look like an idiot or total weirdo on the way—to get to that thing I know in my heart is somehow related, even if I have no idea what it is yet! 

That is, the key to learning to make connections is self-acceptance and trusting your instincts. Once you accept all that you don’t know—and that what you do know and how you know it is perfectly valid—the connections just start coming, you don’t even have to try. And the more fun you have doing it, the better it works! It's true freedom :)

What is it about this upcoming class that you are most excited to explore with others? How do you think the experience of being in your course can help us expand our minds and what we think is possible in the realm of art, life and research? No pressure. Lol.

This sounds a bit cheesy, but there really is nothing more beautiful than a mind set free. I’m just excited to facilitate people getting in touch with what their own unique minds can do.

I know that libraries can be intimidating, especially for younger generations who have grown up looking for everything they might need or wonder on the internet. What I hope participants will experience is the sort of, well, ecstasy that can come from ripping their brain away from digital devices and diving into the haptic experience of reading, studying and exploring in the library!

It’s hard to describe what happens to your brain when you give up your phone’s note taking app for a paper notebook, when you try to stop outsourcing your memory to an automated calendar, or refuse to sacrifice your dreams anymore to nighttime Youtube binges. 

The course isn’t exactly a digital detox, but it is an attempt to reacquaint ourselves with what the naked brain is capable of! I think young—or old—humans currently experiencing blocks or burnout, or looking sincerely for new forms of inspiration can particularly benefit. It’s like yoga for your mind!

But there’s also the practical stuff: it blows my mind that some people who have been in Berlin for decades still don’t have even one local library card. I’m looking forward to showing participants the ropes to the amazing library system we have in this city, from rare book rooms, to bestsellers, to libraries of things (i.e. musical instruments, sports equipment, sculptures and art to hang on the wall); to magazine, newspaper and manuscript databases. 

A lot of people don’t realize that not only are there numerous city and state libraries in Berlin that are 100% open to the public, but university, museum, and specialty libraries too. A lot of titles, materials, and access to online materials that in other countries are under lock and key, behind paywalls or only available to people with certain credentials are wide open to Berliners–if we just know the right way to ask. 

What have you learned from doing artistic research for other artists? Any notable experiences? How does doing research for others and for your own projects differ?

The cool thing about working for other artists is they ask you to look into things you might never have thought to look into on your own. For example, I was asked to do research on the fruits of Soviet Central Asia for a Eurasian artist collective. That had me browsing images in agricultural encyclopedias from places like Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, and reading up on Mongolian myths … which was fascinating. 

A project with a dancer who was working on a piece about the devastating 2020 explosion in Beirut—and possible thematic connections with the Port of Hamburg—led me to collect images of toxic clouds from ammonium nitrate detonations. It also led me to explore the very shady world of shipping logistics in German ports. As I found myself sketching out maps of toxic waste transport routes and exploring all the name changes of various companies, for a second there I felt like an investigative reporter in some thriller.

It’s this really uncanny feeling when you stumble upon two tidbits of information that you know no one in the universe has probably ever put together before. To me, that’s real poetry. That’s art. 

The hard part sometimes though is, well, “selling” that creative serendipity to the other artist. The connections you report back to the people you’re researching for feel like very fresh ideas that you ultimately get personally little credit for.

On the other hand, when I’m doing research for my own work, for sure I get to keep my own ideas—but it’s harder to rein them in. Since I don’t always have an end goal, I kind of can’t stop! Then I end up like the guy in “A Beautiful Mind”—my walls all dressed up with lots of ideas and no place to go. Lol. 

Scene from Beautiful Mind

What can we gain from continued exploration of the analog world that we can’t get in the digital realm?

I used to jokingly call my practice “bibliographic doomsday prepping,” because I always wondered what exactly we would do to get the information we needed if there was, like, a massive blackout and all the computers went dark. Having a collection of physical books and ephemera (zines, magazines, pamphlets, postcards, etc.) somehow makes me feel safe. Like I can’t be deleted just like that. I know there are people out there who are skilled with using software, but are they all equally skilled with hardware? Like soldering parts together to make the lights in the laptop go on? 

It makes me nervous that, without the use of some device I fundamentally don’t understand, in 5 years I may not be able to even view any files on my old external harddrive—or even more dystopian, it might be locked behind some corporation or government’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) software. Meanwhile, though, we can still look at several-thousands-year-old papyruses, say, from ancient Egypt. We may not know how to read them, but we can still at least look at them, maybe touch, smell them—and that’s all information, too. 

Of course we all also know the stories of people’s social media accounts being irremediably shut down and lost without any explanation from the platform, or whole hard-drives getting corrupted. Nothing comparable can happen nowadays with personal analog collections. Except maybe them burning down.

So yes, books and things on paper can catch fire, or get a little moldy maybe, but all in all as a technology they’re much more resilient. To use them you don’t need any special skills except knowing how to read, and perhaps write with a pen (a skill I understand is becoming scarce). They’re also pretty surveillance-proof. There’s a reason people write all their crypto-passwords into a paper notebook!

Then there’s the idea of multi-sensory input. For people with ADHD, for example: If you’re looking at a screen all the time, it is extraordinarily hard to not get sucked into it—or get distracted by all the possibilities beckoning from all corners of the internet. Meanwhile, when you shut off the phone or the computer, in a way you also shut off your whole archive.

Do you ever get the feeling when someone asks you what you’re doing or what you’re interested in right now, your mind goes blank? By looking at the spines of books on your shelf, or writing out thoughts in notebooks or cards you can go back to, you have a sort of cheat sheet to the things you’re interested in, without getting mixed up in the morass of digital media. 

Finally, analog just feels more human. Isn’t there something just kind of sad about dead people’s Facebook profiles? Doesn’t leaving behind a pile of underlined books, a journal or a sketch or a photo clipped from the newspaper feel a slight bit more dignified? Especially for an artist? I’m not sure why … it just seems like better proof that we were actually here. 

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To see more of Mara’s work, visit her on The Night Library’s instagram page here.

For more information and to sign-up for Libraries: Ultimate Open Source, her 5-week online class beginning 14. October at School of Machines in Berlin, click here.