Reading Room
The LAABF 2026 Reading Room focuses on the politics of sound, drawing inspiration from publishers who use the print medium to explore the relationship between sound, geography, and ecology. The installation features newly commissioned works by a select group of exhibitors, as well as a series of videos and listening stations. Additional Fair participants will contribute titles related to this theme for a collective reference library hosted in the space. A series of custom modular cushions, produced by the multi-disciplinary design studio groupsports, create a non-hierarchical “social floor” for gathering, using reclaimed latex, wool, and fabric from LA County’s post-industrial waste streams. In contrast to the rapid speed at which visitors move through the Fair, this program offers an alternative space to engage in close reading, listening, research, and reflection.
In this year’s Reading Room, sound functions as both a sensory medium and a political instrument, tracing how landscapes are shaped by power, memory, and displacement. Works like Aventures LTD.’s cassette edition foreground the circulation of music as a form of intimate, portable archive within diasporic networks, where sound becomes a vessel for belonging across fractured geographies. Metabolic Studio’s interactive sonic map of LA’s Owens River Valley (Payahuunadu) uses wind, animals, and industrial disturbance as testaments to the ecological consequences of human intervention, making audible the otherwise invisible entanglements between extraction, habitation, and environmental degradation. Across the border, Cynthia Magazine pays homage to the genre of Música Regional Mexicana, while Living Earth’s bioregional recordings catalog years of site-specific performances in response to west coast ecologies by a network of artists and activists. From there, F.A.G. Archive’s collection of photocopied facsimiles outline how trans communities endured the HIV/AIDS crisis and what relics they leave behind, both in print and in recordings of poetry readings. In these practices, sound attunes to both social and geological formations, as well as the political conditions that reshape them, like in Khabar Keslan’s account of how a sacred mountain in South Lebanon has been redefined by Israeli militarization and surveillance.
Publishing, in its expanded forms—music, magazine, archive, installation—threads together interdisciplinary projects and makes the relationships between artist, medium, and public more legible. It constructs a shared space of attention around political questions, from settler-colonial land transformations to queer and trans histories, and from post-industrial material reuse to evolving musical traditions. Altogether, the works in this Reading Room frame publishing as a collective, relational act: one that anchors artistic practices in local political realities while also creating international audiences through collaboration and circulation.
Contributions include:
Hand to Hand is a new cassette tape edition by Aventures LTD. (A22). The project draws inspiration from histories of bootleg mixtapes exchanged by family and through travel across the Palestinian diaspora. It pays homage to the preciousness of music as a souvenir, especially for people displaced or in exile. Hand to Hand is a collaboration with UNIBROW SUN and Glue Factory, and is assembled by Sabri Sundos, Michelle Nazzal, and Andrew Miller.
Cynthia Magazine (H29) pays tribute to their latest issue’s cover star, Chino Pacas, whose music is transforming the genre of Música Regional Mexicana.
F.A.G. Archive (I4) presents a visual representation of life-between-the-lines through a display of photocopied archival ephemera. The installation features a living altar dedicated to trans ancestors and victims of AIDS, and includes audio of excerpted poetry readings.
groupsports contributes an iteration of their project, Social Floor: a series of modular cushions offering varying formations for different social functions. Taking cues from the majlis مجلس sitting room, the cushions create a gathering space that’s low to the ground, soft, and non-hierarchical. This edition is inspired by ablaq أبلق, an architectural technique that alternates soft limestone and black basalt used in the Damascus courtyard typology. Designed responsively to materials available in LA County post-industrial waste streams, this set is made from reclaimed latex, wool, and fabric.
Metabolic Studio (D8) presents Payahuunadu Interactive Sound Map, a work that transmits sounds produced by animals, geological phenomena, and human activities recorded by Metabolic Studio around Payahuunadu, also known as the Owens Valley. The listener is able to combine and isolate site specific field recordings as a way to experience the unintended yet pervasive effects of human-made, artificial sounds on the ecosystem surrounding the Owens Dry Lake Bed. The study of sonic landscapes can reveal invisible networks of interdependence throughout the natural world.
Khabar Keslan Magazine (H28) explores the relationship between the residents of the Bekaa Valley and South Lebanon with Jabal al-Shaykh, the mountain overlooking their communities. The project builds on ongoing research and traces how local perceptions of the mountain are shifting from that of a sacred, life-sustaining landscape to a relationship marked by distance, restriction, and surveillance amidst ongoing Israeli settler-colonial expansion.
Living Earth presents a multi-media exploration of Los Angeles’ bioregions through an archive of outdoor performances. The installation features recordings of live music, an eco-surrealist plein air portrait, film, photos, and other ephemera that expand upon their ongoing collective practice of site-specific gatherings around music, performance, and ecology.