Shop Talk: Collective Subjectivity

​A talk on collectivities, by Queer Collective Workers' Union co-organizer Noam Youngrak Son (Brussels).

​*

​Noam Youngrak Son is a theorist of material culture, science-fiction writer, and cultural worker based in Brussels. Trained in design, they now develop speculative narratives and theoretical frameworks concerned with technics, ecology, gender, political economy, and the conditions of cultural production. Their work develops across multiple mediations — including essays, speculative fiction, diagrams, lectures, web-based narrative systems, and organizational forms — according to the material conditions of each inquiry. Son critically examines the politics of representation and asks how human and nonhuman bodies, infrastructures, and systems of value are organized through material and representational regimes. For Son, science fiction is a materialist method for approaching the not-yet: forms of life already latent in the present but not yet available to existing regimes of representation. Positioned “in but not of” contemporary cultural institutions, they approach them as sites through which broader social and ecological contradictions become legible. They publish the Archive of Patchy Studies as an experiment in how creative labor—namely artmaking and writing—can sustain its value without institutional mediation. As a cultural worker, they co-organize the Queer Collective Workers’ Union in response to the enclosure of queer commons within and around cultural collectives.

​*

​FORTUNE presents: PRINT TIME AFTER TIME, a weekend-long gathering around print — its methods, its practices, its manifold lives, afterlives, and half-lives. Focusing on publishers and printshops with liberatory work models; print projects led by queer, trans, BIPOC artists; both local standbys and traveling acts — PRINT TIME AFTER TIME offers workshops and panels, and closes with a book fair featuring collectively operated print projects and presses.

​We hope to ask: How can print learn from, and leverage, its archives? Why do analog print forms continue to matter, in all the material and labor of their assembly? How can print continue to meet its publics, with intention? What can self-publishing as a collective practice teach us, time after time?

​For more PRINT TIME AFTER TIME events, view our calendar here.

​PRINT TIME AFTER TIME will take place at Icebox Mall, and is one of myriad projects produced during Collective Futures (October 2–November 15, 2026).