Naranja Publicaciones

What motivated you to start publishing?

We were motivated by the encounter with the work of two artists: Javiera Pintocanales and Ulises Carrión. Javiera Pintocanales is a Chilean artist, designer and bookbinder who has worked mainly with the book as medium. When we saw a video in 2015 of her talking about how she makes her books, it was met with great admiration. As for Ulises Carrión, we got to know his work thanks to the “Dear Reader. Don’t read” exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain, in 2016. There we were able to see much of his work in books, postcards, graphics, performances and videos. Undoubtedly, this milestone made us come back from this trip with a lot of desire to research and create artist publications.

How do you define and develop your artistic program?

We are interested in all kinds of artistic practices where the space-time sequence converges in different formats and media. We are particularly motivated by any work that presents some manifestation of the book, language and its limits, and these elements define our field of interest, feeding our project from its different channels: bookstore, publisher and collection.

What is your role in the creation of a publication?

It depends on the project. Within Naranja there are two of us: Sebastián Arancibia and Sebastián Barrante. We both have individual works that we publish through this platform. In these individual processes, depending on the project, we both play the role of authorship/accompaniment in a symbiotic way in each of the processes.

When we work together as a duo, we generate a collaborative creative process in which we create through each other’s strengths.

In projects with third parties, such as artists, we fulfil the role of co-authorship, where editing is part of the work of translating a concept or idea into something tangible.

What do you look for in a project?

We publish projects that search for new languages through the intersection of media that help to understand these codes. It is as if we are constantly creating new alphabets that, when published, require a specific medium to be read.

As far as themes are concerned, we don’t have a particular interest in any particular subject. We generally get involved in projects where we can make an emotional connection between the initial idea and the artist.

Do you have any advice to artists planning to make a publication?

Understand how the chosen medium works before publishing.

What do you consider to be the biggest challenge as a publisher?

There may be several, but if we think of it as a publishing house that produces from Chile, a great challenge is our geographical location, far from all the main international centres where the discipline is developed; and related to this, the constant material precariousness that we face when we think of a project.