Incendium Radical Library started because we wanted to challenge the commodification of libraries, whether government, university, or council based. We see a mass production of a certain type of thinking which reproduces the structures of oppression that we live under.
We use the word radical in its original sense—to get to the root of something. We are defined by an affiliation with critical and experience-based perspectives of the world. We see intentional spaces such as this as essential meeting places to develop community. Incendium is for anyone who is interested in critical literature or a comfortable space to read.
The current collection is curated based on our own personal interests and projects, as well as the interests of previous radical libraries that have built the collection over the years, from Barricade bookshop; Loophole, HOP and Hotshots community centres; and the Incendium mobile library. We prioritise materials that center the voices of marginalised communities and individuals, and that document and support social change.
Incendium Radical Library Press is an independant publisher run out of the library. The press prioritises critical and experience-based perspectives of the world, and attemps to center marginalised voices. The press is founded with a belief in the transformative potential of reading and writing with community.
The library is run by
Anne-lise Ah-Fat and Tilly Glascodine.
Anne-lise Ah-fat is a community organiser, mother of two, facilitator and family violence practitioner who is passionate about transformative justice, reading groups and radical literature. Anne-lise loves to think, reflect and practice accountability, prison abolition and absolutely loves malleefowl. Anne-lise works with persons of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds and believes that social change can only occur collectively.
Anne-lise is the co-founder of Undercurrent Community Education Project, Incendium Radical Library, IRL Infoshop, IRL letter writing group with people inside prison, and Radio A and A, Transformative Justice Podcast.
Tilly Glascodine is an artist and librarian.
She is passionate about transformative justice, utopian speculative fiction, critical theory, and nice views.
Tilly co-founded Incendium Radical Library and runs the IRL poetry nights and IRL publishing press. She also runs Another World Library, a portable library focused on critical utopias, and collective imaginings of anti-capitalist futures.
Incendium Radical Library is currently looking for a new space.
IRL is situated on the land of the Wurundjeri & Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation. We stand on this land as beneficiaries of an uncompensated and unreconciled dispossession which began over 200 years ago and continues today.
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