Dear designers, diletantes and partners in crime, 

Who’s not afraid of dissonances, messy design her stories, nonneutrality and seeks out to deconstruct the exclusionary and oppressive modes in graphic design? Let’s browse and dive into texts that question the graphic design canon, tackle power structures in visual culture and push for a feminist shift in graphic design. 

The design researcher and performance artist Ece Canli points out inher essay Design History Interrupted. A QueerFeminist Perspective: «An urge for queer turn is not to call for a new trend or a movement in design for the sake of design; Nor is it a linear progression from feminism. It is a project of axcavating, unfolding and unravelling the hegemonies of a material practice deeply entrenched in our cultural, social, and daily contexts». 

The workshop will offer an incomplete list of strategies and tactics, to be addressed collectively and individually by the participants. Rereadings, misreadings and imagined readings of a text will be exercised again and again. To expand the participants panoply of tools and rule sets, the workshop explicitly provides a space for trying out messiness as a means to destabilise hierarchical constructions. 

To capture the demands, desires and biddings of such a fenetics,emancipated, reflected, graphic design practic, the workshoparea will retranslate their findings, observations and discourse into a classifiedad patchwork. 

The medium for the workshop is inspired by the Gay Areas Telephone Directory, a queer director that featured listings and classified ads for business friendly towards or catering to lesbian and gay men. It was originally published by Gay International Inc. in 1983 at a time when such visibility was rare and potentially dangerous.