One And Many Mirrors: Perspectives On Graphic Design Education

Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal diary in which the artist and filmmaker Noor Abed compiles visual and poetic notes from the production phase of her film A Night We Held Between, filmed in Palestine in 2023 with family and friends.

Like the film, the book interweaves narrative fragments, song and diaristic observations, creating a fusion of natural and composed sequences of movement, of documentary and fictional elements.

Through a choreography of bodies, sites, stories, and temporalities, Abed’s work prompts contemplation on the manifestations of social action and resistance in everyday life.

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated and run by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen. Since 2016, in numerous contexts, they have rehearsed alternatives to the kinds of reading they were taught in school, actively suppressing semantic content through strobe lights, strange postures, sociality, and toxins. Operating at the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader, they attempt to build a practice from within the unstable space of reading itself.

Répondeur is an extensive account of SRC’s practice in collective reading sessions, exhibitions, and textual bootlegging. Imagined as a scroll, with a rhyme structure and typesetting by Will Holder, the book brings together facsimiles of SRC readers, a wide-ranging interview by Alicja Melzacka, new texts by Joyelle McSweeney and Bill Dietz, and visual work and translations by SRC. These discrete elements are interwoven into a complex, shimmering whole, delighting in the ruptures and elisions of one text’s move into the next.

Two Revolutions a Day marks the first in-depth publication devoted to the work of Sophie Nys, whose artistic practice over the past two decades has unfolded through an enterprising interplay of research, observation, and formal experimentation. Moving between exhibition-making, design, and subtle acts of re-framing, Nys has developed an oeuvre that resists fixed categories while remaining acutely attentive to the structures – historical, linguistic, psychological – that shape how meaning is produced and circulated.

Rather than presenting a linear retrospective, Two Revolutions a Day is organised as an extended conversation between Nys and critic Christophe Van Gerrewey that mirrors the artist’s own methods. Together, they revisit key works and exhibitions from the early 2000s to today, tracing recurring motifs and questions while allowing contradictions and shifts in perspective to remain visible.

Throughout the book, Nys’s fascination with systems of power and authority intersects with a sensitivity to intimacy, subjectivity, and the everyday, engaging with feminist perspectives that examine the politics of representation. Historical figures, marginal anecdotes, and overlooked documents appear alongside reflections on resistance, collaboration, design, and the conditions under which artworks –and the social roles they inhabit – come into being. Language, in particular, emerges as both material and problem: a tool that promises clarity while constantly slipping, misfiring, or revealing its own limits.

This book brings together a selection of photographs by artist Mekhitar Garabedian, documenting the warehouse of his late father’s company, Melantex, which exported second-hand clothing from Belgium to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The images inspired a one-year sculptural intervention by Garabedian, commissioned by the Antwerp Public Art Collection.

Import—Export, Friperie tells a compelling personal and collective story of how displacement can be turned into economic livelihood while creating connections between old and new homes, languages, and textiles.

The photographs are accompanied by an in-depth conversation between Garabedian and curator Samuel Saelemakers about the relationship between photography and sculpture, public representation, and diasporic thinking.

A critical exploration of the values and qualities inherent in independent educational organizations and the hurdles in the way of remaining "alternative" with the passing of time.

Anna Colin is programme director of the MFA Curating and co-director of the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, London. Besides Open School East, Anna worked as associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2014–20), associate director at Bétonsalon, Paris (2011–12), and curator at Gasworks, London (2007–10). She co-curated Chaleur Humaine, the 2nd Dunkirk Art & Industry Triennale (2023–24) on the relationship between energy and the arts since 1973. She holds a PhD in cultural geography and has a training in arboriculture.

Edited by Céline Chazalviel, Alice Dusapin, Sophie Orlando.
Texts by Anna Colin and Catherine Quéloz.

A self-taught typographic letterer, Chrystel Crickx used to cut out letters by hand and sell them by the piece in her Publi Fluor shop in Schaerbeek, Belgium. Commercialized between 1975 and 2000 for local advertising and signage purposes, these letters have since been digitized and made more widely available to users outside of the Belgian borders and in other contexts. At the margins of standard means of communication, they have contributed to shape (and still do) the urban visual landscape, in Brussels and elsewhere.

This non-standard, collective essay attempts both to recount the life of a type model — as well as of its successive authors and their tools — while expanding the field of investigation to examine the cracks between the different stories summoned up by Chrystel Crickx's practice summons up.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to design. It is as much a practice as it is a methodology or way of thinking, a multifaceted discipline that moves with society’s progression. Throughout the creative process behind every design, learnings happen. Designers learn to adapt, adjusting their positions relative to the context. This volume spotlights self-organised, spontaneous, sporadic, and informal educational initiatives within the realm of creative practices, both historical and contemporary. The initiatives presented here show that any attempt to control a narrative and limit it to a single understanding risks stifling potential innovations that might arise from unexpected origins.

Featuring contributions from Amanda Ariawan, Andriew Budiman, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Chabib Duto Hapsoro, Czar Kristoff J.P., Filippo Sciascia, Fiorent Fernisia, Gideon Kong, Jacob Lindgren, Jeremy Sharma, Keni K. Soeriaatmadja, Limestone Books, Livian Aurel V. Purwanto, Mac Andre Arboleda, Nishkra, Prananda L. Malasan, R.A. Dita Saraswati, Reza Afisina, Rouzel Waworuntu Saad, Savira Aristi, Trevor Embury, and Virliany Rizqia Putri.

New York-based professor Lytle Shaw journeys to Italy in this adventurous exploration of the life and work of architect, designer, and photographer Carlo Mollino (1905–1973). In 1933 the young Mollino received a commission from Mussolini’s regime for his first building: an administrative centre in Piedmont. Later works include furniture and interior design, a book on photography, and an asymmetrical car that raced at Le Mans in 1955.

The book centres around Shaw’s realisation that this prolific talent’s conflicted legacy offers a unique window on the role that post-war Italian politics and culture played in the country’s reimagining of itself as a victim, rather than a proponent, of fascism.

“… Ever since its inception as a profession, graphic design has exhibited its necessity to make information public. Its urge to expand and to reproduce reflects its capitalist inheritance. This desire however isn’t always shared by all stories molded and articulated by the discipline.

Publishing is preceded by a series of labours, but the act itself consists just of a very instant. It is one loud shriek from the top of a hill. A toppling-over. From then on a story will tumble downhill—distribute and disseminate. However that happens, and who it reaches is an unpredictable process. Thereafter publishing enables, and sets in motion, all its future readings and retellings.

Wondering the many contradictory sensibilities contained in this process, we attempt to grasp their whys, their hows and their ifs. The following essays— written by Sunny Lei, Haron Barashed, Agathe Mathel, Alina Scharnhorst, Villem Sarapuu, Gal Šnajder, Seppe-Hazel Laeremans, Fernanda Saval and Eva Claycomb—stretch and curl in between these various registers of opening up and closing in.

Unraveling the movements, strategies, forms and intentions of publishing, this book attempts to unfold their utterances, platforms, languidities, reinterpretations, identities, tactilities, ambiguities, characters and audiences.”

—from the introduction by Seppe-Hazel Laeremans and Agathe Mathel.