Posting

The book Posting brings together a selection of feminist posters from Dutch archives to reflect on posting as an activist strategy, holding the potential to create counter-publics to mainstream culture and to fight against the erasure, exoticization, or tokenism of bodies and experiences that deviate from normative preconceptions.

As is the case for many professions, in the history of Dutch graphic design the absence of women, non-binary, queer, Black designers is striking. This doesn’t only point back to systematic processes of exclusion in the first place, but also to the biases at play regarding whose work is remembered and archived. While efforts have been made to add forgotten names to the existing canon, the many posters, flyers and other printed matter shelved in queer and feminist archives remind us to question the notion of single authorship altogether and instead study graphic design as a decisively collaborative and transdisciplinary practice. Especially for community-led and volunteer-based projects, but also for individual expressions in a feminist spirit, it’s less of a concern who is the designer or creator, or what the medium is—a printed poster or book, a photo, video or text uploaded online, or a new platform—but rather what the act of making public entails, showing what one stands for, what is deemed important. Self-organized infrastructures for the creation, production, publication and distribution of contents shift into the center of attention, and here, we can learn from feminist initiatives in the ‘70s and ‘80s, who built collective and diverse graphic signatures, set up feminist printing collectives, publishing houses, and bookstores.

The posters featured in this book point to this rich landscape of feminist organizing, and were found at the International Institute of Social History and the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV-Atria) in Amsterdam. They are framed by an introductory essay by Carolina Valente Pinto and an intergenerational roundtable conversation, in which posting is discussed as a way to (re)imagine and (re)design the social. The roundtable conversation, which was held as a multilingual space, has been translated into English and Dutch by Shira Wolfe.

Source of all images: Collection of the International Archive for the Women’s Movement, Amsterdam: Atria, Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History

Pre-press work for a poster of Vrouwendrukkerij Las Muchachas [Women’s Press Las Muchachas], 198[?].

Poster for women’s strike Vrouwen, leg het werk neer! [Women, Put Down Your Work!] by Vrouwenhuis Den Haag, 1980.

Poster Alle vrouwen zijn technies [All Women are Technicians],Steungroep Vrouwen in Techniese Beroepen, 1978[?].

Poster 21 vormgevers [21 Designers], exhibition by Stichting Amazone, voor en door vrouwen, 1985.

144 p, ills color, 16 × 23,7 cm, Dutch/English