News & Collaborations

Futuress was nominated for this year’s Swiss Design Awards, and invited to present our work in the form of an exhibition. But how can we present the intangible work of a transnational feminist platform for design politics? And how to do it specifically in the context of a design prize that has historically foregrounded abstract and problematic notions such as “merit,” “quality,” and “good design”? Our solution: we used the chance to come together as a community and claim space, being the killjoys of design that we are. Together, we tagged, graffitied, and drew—while dancing and laughing a lot. Our wall was messy, imperfect, and rebellious—just like us! But it was also beautiful, full of joy and a lust for life. In the end, we didn’t win the prize, but we won the hearts of many who stopped by! On the last Friday of the exhibition, we were joined by Naomi Samake and Ana Santos from the Racial Justice Student Collective for an open discussion on anti-hegemonic networks, moderated by our friend Jonas Berthod.

Futuress had the pleasure to re-publish some of the text from the past issue of A Line Which Forms a Volume! The publication is a critical reader and symposium of graphic design-led research that is edited, written, designed, and published by participants of the MA Graphic Media Design course at London College of Communication, U.K. Issue #4 approaches the topic of decoloniality and the constructed borders of the design canon. It asks: “What are the boundaries that graphic design exists within?” Dive into the conversation with Clara Balaguer, and learn why using open-source programs entails a privilege in Learning from the Vernacular by Rhys Atkinson. Explore how Lucas LaRochelle queers artificial intelligence in Queer Dreams of an A.I. by Riccardo Righi, and follow Yu Jiwon as she talks about the representation of Asian Design in the West in The Interlocality of Typography by Rachel So Dam Jung!

Could design be reimagined as a care practice? This question lies at the core of Alter-Care, a journal edited by Cherry-Ann Davis and Nina Paim, on behalf of Futuress for the 2021 Porto Design Biennial. Acknowledging the violent colonial entanglements of Portugal, the duo populated the issue with the ideas of Brazilian designers, artists, curators, and thinkers who are deeply committed to inclusivity, participation, and collaboration: Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins wrote about their experience of co-directing ESDI, the Industrial Design University in Rio de Janeiro; in a long-form interview, curator Keyna Eleison discusses the violence embedded in Eurocentric notions of care; Indigenous artist and designer Denilson Baniwa imagined how Rio would look through forest regeneration—interweaving existing infrastructure and Indigenous knowledge—and finally, the editors Cherry-Ann and Nina co-wrote Does Design Care? problematizing design’s recent interest in care!

Issue #47 of the South Korean magazine GRAPHIC brings together several projects by designers, design researchers, and artists concerned with contemporary social issues around social, spatial, and climate justice. They invited 10 teams to convey their research from different angles and areas, including MMS, Klasse Klima, and Futuress, among others. Each was given 16 pages to present their work. Some contributed a report, a chronology, or diary; others showcased transcripted talks, interviews, and even coloring books. Futuress contributed a preview of the Troublemakers Class of 2020 in the form of an extended content page. The contributions and essays by the various teams are not bound together. Instead, they were collected separately as brochures and flyers inside a box—a gesture that reflects the sharp rise in the use of postal services due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Pandemics do not materialize in isolation,” Edna Bonhomme, a historian of science, has rightly pointed out. “They are part and parcel of capitalism and colonization.” A crisis brings to light the hidden cracks in a system, something particularly true for the cultural sector, which has been highly affected by COVID-19. Organized by Futuress and the Centre culturel suisse Paris, the lecture series “Making and Unmaking Exhibitions” aims to critically address the impact of the climate crisis within the museums, galleries and other exhibition contexts. Understanding that sustainability means the concerted effort towards climate, spacial, and social justice, we’ve invited practitioners from different cultural backgrounds to share their varied perspectives. This includes Dhaka Art Summit curator Diana Campbell Betancourt, MAM-Rio artistic co-director Keyna Eleison, Bangladeshi architect Inteza Shariar, Swiss artist Ramaya Tegegne, and Australian museum scholar Fiona Cameron, amongst others. The full program can be watched online, and will later appear as texts on Futuress.

At the beginning of 2021, our co-founding editors Eliot Gisel and Madeleine Morley left Futuress to work on new initiatives—we thank them for their contributions, and wish them all the best in their future endeavors! In the meantime, Futuress has sprouted a new team: Maya Ober, activist, educator, designer, researcher, founder of depatriarchise design, and long-standing ally is our new associate editor; Mio Kojima, German-Japanese designer and researcher joins us as our new editorial assistant; Cherry-Ann Davis, designer, writer, and marketing strategist from the twin island of Trinidad and Tobago is our new workshop co-facilitator; and Sacha Fortuné, the fabulous Trinidadian writer with a background in International Journalism and Media & Cultural Studies is our new copyeditor. Welcome, everyone!

In a public lecture at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Maya Ober and Anja Neidhardt from depatriarchise design, together with Madeleine Morley and Nina Paim from Futuress, shared a few insights from their recent joint article Diversity Issues. The text, published Dec 4, 2020, details experiences of abuse and discrimination within Swiss art and design education including instances of racism, sexism, ableism, and more. The lecture revealed the research methodology behind the article, contextualized the issue historically, and presented several initiatives that have been striving to bring these issues to a wider public and spark a transformation of art and design education. If you missed it, don’t worry: the lecture recording can be watched on the Design Academy Eindhoven’s Youtube channel.

Feminist Findings by the Liberation in Print Collective is a zine filled with stories on the labor, loves, networks, hierarchies, friendships, fallouts, struggles, victories, economics, designs, and daily lives of womxn in the past. It works out what it might mean to organize a feminist praxis. Especially from the late 1960s onwards, publishing became a crucial means for womxn to build community and inspire social change. Feminist Findings chronicles these means and methods, seeking to garner what we can learn today from the movements that came before us. All stories result from a workshop initiated by le Signe, the National Center for Graphics in Chaumont, France in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—the very first Futuress fellowship. With libraries and universities shut, the L.i.P. Collective sought to resurface the unknown histories embedded in these online archives, and make them known to a wider readership. Read all the texts on our website!

Feminist Findings showcases the joint research of the L.i.P. Collective—the very first Futuress fellowship, which ran from April–June 2020. Spread over four continents and many time zones, 23 women and non-binary people connected through the beams of their computer screens to dig through digital archives, searching for the missing histories of feminist journals, magazines, zines, newspapers, and newsletters. A wunderkammer brimming with photographs, artefacts, logos, magazines, quotes, excerpts, resources, pages, footnotes, and digressions, Feminist Findings is a messy, knotted web manifesting its own collective research process. Visitors can discover the struggles and victories of a 1980s San Francisco newsletter for Asian/Pacific lesbians, solve the mystery of an underground tea-room in Paris, hear from the co-founder of India’s first feminist press, and learn how writing a feminist history of Swiss graphic design might start by calling up a neighbor, and much more. The show is curated by Eliot Gisel, Madeleine Morley, and Nina Paim for Futuress, and runs from July 30 to September 24, 2020 at A—Z Berlin.

Eliot Gisel is a Swiss journalist, editor, and researcher exploring topics such as design education, dress culture, city politics, visual rhetorics of resistance, LGBTQIA+ activism, culture, and the politics of language. Madeleine Morley is a Berlin-based British writer and editor who combines the tools of journalism and archival research as she delves into histories of design, media, and feminism. Nina Paim is a Brazilian designer, researcher, curator, educator, and activist, whose work revolves around notions of directing, supporting, and collaborating. During the uncertain and unstable times of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Europe, these three came together to envision Futuress as a space for togetherness, generosity, resistance, growth, and social purpose. They jointly applied and received a Pro-Helvetia Grant, which allowed for the evolution of Futuress into a hybrid publishing and learning platform!