The Project
Libertaire Imaginaries is a set of two publications on the question of anarchist design. They are part of an ongoing project for my Master's "mémoire" (acting as a pre-thesis). The research is attempting to lay out the groundwork for the following questions:
- How can we activate new emancipating libertaire imaginaries through graphic design?
- How can we shape the anarchist/ic image in a way that eludes institutional appropriation?
- How can we help prefigurative structures and experiments through visual communication?
The first part is to identify the imagery anarchist and libertaire-principled movements inherit. While being highly informed from other socialist graphic codes in the beginning, through the 80s squat movements and punk aesthetic, today's visuals have changed quite a bit. Anarchism (and other libertaire radical movements) hevily espouse that DIY visual aesthetic and have produced their own graphical codes and customs. While this is helpful in order to identify the movements, it's still marketable and subject to commodification as nothing more than a Pinterest or Instagram aesthetic. Therein lie these questions that these movements I feel have not asked themselves, or at least not enough, or not in the right manner. The aim with this work and the search that will follow is not to provide answers; I am in no position to speak for all of those movements; it is rather to ask the right questions and hopefully see them spread horizontally among people in these movements.
The publications
Both pieces were created for and during the Design et Politique du Multiple Master course at Erg Brussels. The first compiles different striking visual elements I took out from several anarchist periodicals. It attemps to show the visual heritage of the movement, as well as highlight the need to focus on the image created through repetitive vocabulary. It's binded by printing on a set of A3 papers which are folded in 4 horizontally and put together like an accordion, or a detached leporello. The paper is thick, heavy and creamy, to allow spreading the pages on a flat surface more easily and highlight the historical aspect of the project. The no-glue no-stitch approach is made so that anyone can download the PDF and print it themselves and assemble a book that could be shown at an infokiosk as well as hold value as a nice object to keep.
The second is a booklet with three texts on the subject of my research written by Josh MacPhee, Jeffrey Swartz, and Jared Davidson. The text is not redacted, so as to allow the reader to see it in its integrity, but some sentences are highlighted by me during my reading. This allows the reader to be pulled in the material more easily, and to put forward my situated opinion through these texts, all the while without creating repetition or removing content. I explained my position in the foreword as such:
Designers shape and rearrange, disturb and remodel information on the daily. The whole practice is based on moving text and images around and finding where they fit “best”, hierarchising - i.e. adding importance to a certain statement and inevitably decreasing the importance of another. It’s a constant battle to convey as much weigh in a specific piece of information as the client wants it, to stay transparent, to serve the content, and only the content, through the use of form. What happens when the thing we reshape, rerrange and hierarchise, is opposed to hierarchies, and to silencing or modifying the voices of others?
What happens when a designer applies his authority over an explicitly antiauthoritarian text? What’s a designer without his visual hierarchy? Those are the questions I’m bound to ask myself while working on this book. It seems that if I - espousing radical ideas - wish to share the radical writings of another, my labour becomes a contradiction. What I’d be doing instead of respecting and placing attention on the text would be akin to saying “look, i think it sounds better this way”. It seems incredibly futile, maybe even counterproductive to do this if the objective is propagating and applying the ideas within.
But isn’t that part of the bigger picture? If reading, discussing, and sharing anarchist ideas taught me anything on a personal level, it’s questioning everything, up to and including anarchism itself. As much as my reading, experience, and reformulation might be an authority move on a small scale and from a personal perspective, perhaps it has its place as a contribution to a bigger discussion, as a reaction to the ideas expressed, and as a playing field for anyone who might disagree with me. My subjective reading and following shaping of the material shouldn’t be perceived as a declaration of what is and isn’t interesting. Much less should it be read as a correction of another person’s work.
What should be understood by the visual rearrangement is nothing more than a mise en évidence of my affect’s experience during my reading. Completely avoiding a position of authority is impossible, so I put myself to work knowing - and stating - that I offer only my subjective. I can’t pass this opportunity for such strong contradiction.
Both books are created for not-for-profit and educational only purposes, and will be distributed freely as PDFs on this site (I'm still working on that portion.)
