Papertrail was founded in 2023 by Apsara Flury and Livio Liechti. Apsara is a graphic designer who attracts attention to projects and organisations across varying scales, media and fields, including architecture, arts and culture. Livio is a writer and researcher with a background in human rights and digital rights. Together, we navigate through public spaces and spheres to collect visual artefacts and narrative fragments as means to critique and unpack the everydayness of infrastructure.

We are open to collaborations and commissions aligned with our publishing approach and research focus, including workshops, exhibitions, infrastructure walks and joint publications. 

Past funders and collaborators include the Creative Industries Fund NL, Waag Futurelab, the critical infrastructure lab (University of Amsterdam), Page Not Found, Data & Society and Oxfam Novib.

Get in touch via post[at]papertrail.world.

Follow us on Instagram or Pixelfed

Research focus

Our practice uncovers and investigates how dominant communications infrastructures, and the reductive computational logics that underpin them, (re)produce hidden forms of spatial and epistemic power in the contemporary public sphere.

Infrastructural systems define our ways of seeing and responding to the world around us. Our lives and visual cultures have become dominated by digital content production systems rooted in planetary and human extractivism. As a counterweight to the inherent violence and overpowering ephemerality of these systems, we reinvigorate analogue, place-based forms of knowledge production and sharing to spread infrastructural awareness in the public sphere.

Our research spans multiple sites and temporalities, ranging from more-than-human encounters with rural areas designated as future sites for data centres to place-based urban experiments with post-digital knowledge production and circulation. What unites our different strands of artistic research and production is an embrace of printed matter as a carrier of counter narratives and prefigurative imaginaries.

Papertrail was founded in 2023 by Apsara Flury and Livio Liechti. Apsara is a graphic designer who attracts attention to projects and organisations across varying scales, media and fields, including architecture, arts and culture. Livio is a writer and researcher with a background in human rights and digital rights. Together, we navigate through public spaces and spheres to collect visual artefacts and narrative fragments as means to critique and unpack the everydayness of infrastructure.

Contact and collaboration

We are open to collaborations and commissions aligned with our publishing approach and research focus, including workshops, exhibitions, infrastructure walks and joint publications. 

Past funders and collaborators include the Creative Industries Fund NL, Waag Futurelab, the critical infrastructure lab (University of Amsterdam), Page Not Found, Data & Society and Oxfam Novib.

Get in touch via post[at]papertrail.world.

Follow us on Instagram or Pixelfed

Fairs, Events and Exhibitions