A conference about paper that really wants to be a village fete.
Saturday September 19th 2026 11am-5pm
St Bride Foundation
14 Bride Ln, London EC4Y 8EQ
Speakers
Cindy Sissohko
Based in Lisbon, Cindy is an independent curator, cultural producer, art consultant, and writer whose practice focuses on anticolonial, social and political approaches within the arts and culture.
She is the Associate Program Director (Africa & Europe) at KADIST. She recently worked at the Wellcome Collection, where she curated Hard Graft: Work, Health & Rights (2025) and Expecting: Birth, Belief & Protection (closing on 19 April 2026). She was the co-curator of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Micha Nicheva
Micha is an independent researcher, design strategist, facilitator and coach. She’s the founder of Thought Pattern, a coaching and training studio focused on neurodiversity in the creative and tech industry.
Over the past 15 years, she has worked with a range of companies like TfL, Google and the Institute of Global Health.
Rob Hallifax
Rob is a London-based mechanical engineer turned product manager. He is co-founder of Windfall Energy where he’s developing a home battery storage helping people in flats save money on their bills and use more clean energy.
He set up London’s biggest crowdfunding meetup, advises others with their campaigns and has started a couple of companies on the back of ten Kickstarter projects.
Matt Martin
Matt Martin is a photographer, curator, publisher and gallery owner based in Penzance, Cornwall. Matt has been making zines for 20 years and started the project the Photocopy Club in 2010. He co-ran Doomed Gallery Dalston and was the co-founder of the Photobook Cafe, before starting TONER, a photographic gallery and workshop space.
Dane Whitehurst
Dane Whitehurst is the Creative Director at Burgopak, a company focussed on using packaging design and cardboard engineering to build education, delight and sustainability into the unboxing of products.
Dane is also a visiting lecturer and speaks internationally on the subject of packaging design. He is credited with a host of international patents and design awards and his work has been featured in galleries and museums including the MoMA, NY and The Design Museum, London.
Antonia Stringer
Antonia is the founder of Earthbound Press, a specialist risograph studio and publisher of comics and poetry. As both a commercial press and printer-publisher the wider project of the press is to explore the possibilities of risograph printing.
Now into its seventh year, the Earthbound Poetry Series has featured over 200 poets and artists including Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Cecilia Vicuña, Julia Ball, and Jasper Johns.
Aaron Straup Cope
Aaron is currently Head of Internet Typing at the San Francisco International Airport Museum.
Befor that, Aaron was Editor at Large at Mapzen, the creator of the Who’s On First gazetteer project, Head of Engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Senior Engineer at Flickr and Design Technologist and Director of Inappropriate Project Names at Stamen Design.
(Note Aaron will be giving this talk remotely)
Maria Murad
Maria Murad is a DPhil Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford researching the anthropological training of British colonial officers at Oxford in the 20th century. She co-founded Oxford’s Critical Food Studies Network and works as an assistant in the Lincoln College archives.
Who is this for?
Past events have covered archiving, e-paper, volvelles, method cards, sustainable book printing, magazines, logbooks, handwriting, architectural drawings, maps, drawing, newspapers, paper prototyping, collage and card. So if these topics resonate with, you’ll probably have a good time.
What’s included?
- Talks and hands-on activities
- Lunch (including a vegan option)
- Coffees and tea all day
Past editions of Papercamp
- Papercamp 1 (2009)
- Papercamp 2 (2010)
- Papercamp 3 (2024)
- Papercamp 4 (2025)
“I haven’t experienced so much joy at an event in long while. A wonderful combination of speakers, and such a thought provoking and kind space. ”
Papercamp 4 attendee
Agenda
10:00 Doors open, tea and coffee on arrival
11:00 Kickoff by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, organiser.
11:10 Paper, a political matter (Keynote by Cindy Sissohko)
Through extensive experience in the arts and culture sector in the UK and internationally, Cindy will explore the ways artists have used paper as a political matter, a fundamental collaborator and a conduit for the liberation of people, the resistance of communities and the telling of hidden stories in society. Drawing specifically to her work at the Wellcome Collection in London (2022-2025), she will share how paper and similar alternatives, such as parchment, hold such a predominance in institutional and independent archives.
11:40 Citrus Ephemera (Micha Nicheva, Thought Pattern Studio)
Ephemera isn’t designed to last. Tickets, wrappers, receipts, survive by accident, kept for memory or beauty rather than function. We’ll follow one very specific category of printed paper all the way back to its source: a piece of fruit, a naval problem, and a brief window of design that few people ever think about. It’s a story about why things get wrapped, what happens when the reason goes away, and why some of them are still around.
12:10 How to Break a World Record (Rob Hallifax, Windfall Energy)
A couple of years ago I made a new year’s resolution to break a world record. Some world records mark noble achievements; the best of what humans can do. Striving to be faster, higher, stronger. Many are silly and ridiculous, and some fall somewhere in between. Mine was about three quarters of the way towards the silly end of the spectrum.
12:40 Lunch (including vegan options) & Photocopy Club workshop
14:00 25 years designing to survive and thrive with paper (Dane Whitehurst, Burgopak)
This year, Burgopak celebrates a quarter of a century in the world of packaging. Their mission to transform this space from the beige, bland landscape of tuck cartons and amazon boxes has led them on many adventures. In his talk, Dane takes us through the highs and lows and the strategy that helped the company survive and thrive since 2001.
15:00 Intro to riso (Antonia Stringer, Earthbound Press)
I’ll start off with a whirlwind history of riso — its earlier uses through to the way it’s being used now, with the boom in creative studios and adoption by artists and illustrators. I’ll describe how the machine works, and will go a little bit into how to set up artwork, and the sorts of artworks that work well. This will lead into a discussion of the unpredictability of riso, the happy accidents, the potential disasters, and what can be done about them. Finally, I’ll share some of the weird and wonderful uses of riso that I’ve come across in my time printing, and which I find inspiring as I continue to experiment and play with this very idiosyncratic printing process.
15:30 Break & Photocopy Club workshop
16:00 Paper, Power, and Provision: Cooking through a Colonial Officer’s Recipe Book (Maria Murad, University of Oxford)
This talk will go through the materiality of a cookbook I discovered in the colonial archives at Oxford which belonged to Edward Harland Duckworth(1893–1953), a British officer who served as the Inspector of Education for scientific instruction in Nigeria from 1930–1944. I will touch on the anthropology of paper and writing, and then I will dive deeper into the cookbook itself and discuss two recipes I decided to cook myself, one for apple jelly and the other for cough syrup.
16:30 Meeting people where they are – Postcards, measures of success and the social contract (Aaron Straup Cope, San Francisco International Airport Museum) **remote talk**
I send a lot of postcards to people mostly for no other reason than to practice a “culture of generousity”. Postcards have, by and large, an audience of one. The social, financial and mechanical infrastructure to make that possible depends on the participation of many. We are passing through a moment whose arc, whether out of malice or simple neglect, casts doubt on the viability of either. Pull on that thread long enough and eventually you start to ask yourself whether that terrible Kevin Costner movie (The Postman) wasn’t right all along? Can we have a social contract not simply without mail but without the communal effort required to move paper through space and time?
16:45 Closing remarks by Alex
17:00 Close and move to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
