The Amateur Feminist Library

+ Feminism is a fragile archive, fragmentary, scattered here and there, confined in boxes, attics, and memories. The Feminist Amateur Library aims to bring these shatters and splatters into the physical world, allowing us to touch them and to be touched by them*. Departing from a digital collection of North-American feminist periodicals (dating from 1968-1992), the library decided to take this collection into its own hands, or rather, to put it in the hands of communities, aiming to make these publications more accessible.
Brought to life through public sessions, the library invites its visitors to become amateur feminist librarians — contributing by reading, completing metadata, marking content, discussing, and sharing their findings with each other. For each session, a topical selection (arts, labour, ecology, etc.) of publications is re-printed from the archive. Alternating moments of reading and discussion, the sessions are a space for encounters, re-arrangement, and negotiation, where informal research and collective knowledge production enable the making of dynamic, community-centred herstories.

To accomplish the complex task of administrating and sustaining such a library, a series of friendly tools have been developed. Using solely open-source technologies, they adapt to the evolving needs of the library and allow it to continue living in other places, times, and forms.

*Some words are borrowed to the beautiful introduction of “Living a Feminist Life”, Sarah Ahmed, 2017

Two books presenting the students’ processes and proposals for the trophies awarded to the winners of the Joke Smit Prijs (Women’s Emancipation Prize), and the Jos Brink Prijs (LGBTQIA+ Emancipation Prize), granted by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW).

Design and production for a research project by Lissa Choukrane and Loraine Furter on the bindings of Belgian feminist periodicals: *Agrafes & bouts de ficelles* presents a research on the soft, messy bindings of Belgian feminist publications contained in local archives.

A series of books published by the (fictional) publishing house Serendipitous Editorial Encounters, specialising in the various objects that people forget, or deliberately leave in books.

+ *Who is afraid of the Witch?* is an editorial project articulating academic writing, articles and iconographic materials, all dealing with the figure of the witch in feminist movements and in literature.
Catalysed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville's essay *A reexamination of some aspects of the design arts from the perspective of a woman designer, Who is afraid of the witch?* is an attempt to present a text intended for academics in an apprehensible way, while avoiding any kind of over-simplification or essentialization. To make the book a space for perspectives, where the readers can create their own paths. To acknowledge the authority designers have and to leave room for complexity and ambiguity.
Rather than aiming for an impossible neutrality or objectivity, the design and the structure strive to propose several entries for this text without establishing a hierarchy between the different types of content. The academic text, written by Justyna Sempruch, constitute the skeleton of the book. The articles — inserted between chapters — offer perspectives, enlightenments or complementary informations. The images — linking the main text and the articles — exceed their illustrative role, presenting small visual essays, creating ambiguous meaning and putting in tension the written arguments.

+ An open-ended and open-source identity for KABK's (Royal Academy of Arts The Hague) independent student newspaper. Flexible, collective and collaborative rather than authoritarian and restrictive, this protean identity intends to leave space for interpretation and evolve through time, along with the groups of students constituting the Journal team.
The Mosquito newspaper identity is meant to be taken over, as the design team is renewed for every issue. The challenge here was therefore to create a system that allows personal interpretation and complexity while preserving a sense of identity. A system that could be used by anyone, designer or non-designer, Adobe Indesign or not. That is how emerged the idea of an open-source, instruction-based toolbox, containing a stabilised font, lettering generator (developed on DrawBot ), and a fixed set of shapes.

A study of vernacular photography, through a series of interviews with the ones who make it and/or use it as an artistic medium. All of the interviews were prepared, conducted and transcribed exclusively for this publication.

15 colours, 28 combinations, and a good dozen of hours spent with the Risograph. Imagined in collaboration with Barbara Strzezek, Two Colours is a technical and chromatic guide exploring colour associations and (a part of) the range of visual potentials specific to this technology.

+ Hiterto (until now or until a particular time)
This collective publication — created in the midst of the first lockdown — explores the multiplicity of reactions provoked by a threat invisible to the human eye, with their contradictions, their complexity and the enhanced polarisation of an already divided society.
Trapped in its own topicality, Hitherto cannot take a step back but looks both behind and forward. Emotional rather than rational, fragmentary rather than exhaustive, this publication doesn't pretend to write History but instead presents an immediate comment from the middle of an ongoing crisis. In an ever-changing, ever-evolving situation, Hitherto tries to lay down the first tiles of a bigger picture, aware of the impossibility of its contextualisation. Appropriating visuals that surfaced on the internet during the crisis, Hitherto explores how the pandemic affected every layer of social life, from economy to sexuality, from family to politics. Hitherto navigates through time — chronologically unfolding the milestone events of the crisis. We follow this thread through space — perpetually going back and forth from a macro to a micro scale, from public to private life.

If colours are qualia (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience) — and thus escape language by nature — can images fill the gap between speech and perception? A perceptive exploration of the colour red.

First piece of a collection dedicated to great choreographers of the late twentieth century, this publication focuses on Lucinda Childs' life-long work and collaborations.