Posting

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, which is especially true for community-led and volunteer-based projects. 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. Edited by Carolina Valente Pinto and Tabea Nixdorff Published by Archival Textures, 2024 Bilingual, in Dutch and English Softcover, 144 pages, color images, ISBN: 978-9-08-341944-2