Everything’s Fine

Everything's Fine is a small press based in Manila, Philippines that continues to believe in publishing texts that are creative and critical, and in making books through collaborative and compassionate practices. We see the publication of books, zines, and other printed matter as an opportunity to create an open, kind space for what we believe is a discursive process of making, one that deliberately and consciously builds relationships with all those involved, doing away with the mainstream system's ways of disengaged and alienated acts of making. We welcome ideological intersections with other makers, projects, and initiatives as opportunities to expand on our sensing of what a book can be, what reading can be about, and what kind of community can be built out of both.

Katrina Stuart Santiago, curator, Text, How, Else, Various, 2025 © Katrina Stuart Santiago, curator

For Everything's Fine's participation at Miss Read 2025, we take from the theme of "ecology" and seek to bring new one-off works that engage with this concept not as subject of writing but as interwoven into the practice of bookmaking. Beyond hand- vs machine-made, we propose the imagination of the circularity of material, its repetition and reusability as text, paper, ink, words, and the possibility of recycling other materials for use in the exercise of creating new text-based artefacts from the detritus of other forms of making.

This will be a selling exhibition of handmade artefacts at Miss Read Berlin 2025 by Anina Abola, Zea Asis, Bene, Deidre Camba, Austere Gamao, Ginoe, Jaya Jacobo, Pat Marquez, Carlo Paulo Pacolor, Jam Pascual, Gio Potes, Katrina Santiago.

[+]

Lucinda Skye / Lena Cobangbang, Second Life in Lockdown, Everything's Fine, 2023 © Lucinda Skye / Lena Cobangbang

This pandemic lockdown diary is one of our most enduring works, which is a handwritten journal on the pandemic lockdowns as printed on acetate. It is both a testament to the absurdity of the pandemic lockdowns in the Philippines, as it is an artefact of the post-pandemic as an unstable space, during both of which what we knew for sure to be our experience of those times were rendered irrelevant by a violent governance, and questionable at best by our own psychosis. It is of the past as it is of the present.

[+]

Jam Pascual, Nail Down The Sky, Everything's Fine, 2024 © Jam Pascual

Jam Pascual’s first book of poetry takes from a generation’s particular interest in multi- and meta-narratives and how these inform the crises of belief and ideology, identity and becoming. In this landscape, the crisis of faith is made real through poetry at the same time that it allows grief to take form.

Cover photographs by Renzo Navarro.

[+]

Examining the tension between so-called “alternative text” and the image it is supposed to represent, Mesandel
Virtusio Arguelles presents a collection of several “found images” resulting from failed Google searches due to poor internet connection. These low-res images imagine the possibility for contemporary photography, one that clearly plays with the concept of making presence through absence.

[+]

Ishmael Bernal, Rolando Tinio, Patrick Flores, Neferti Tadiar, Required Readings, Everything's Fine, 2022 © Ishmael Bernal, Rolando Tinio, Patrick Flores, Neferti Tadiar

Required Readings seeks to rediscover essential writings that have fallen through the cracks of the past, or have drowned in the glut of the digital journals, as it
hopes to publish new critical work that engages with the contemporary condition. Gathered in slim volumes, this book series offers historically important, wide-ranging, and sustained inquiries into aspects of Filipino life and culture that are both old and familiar, new and urgent.

[+]