Graphic Cultures of Dissent / Cultures Graphiques de la Contestation

Graphic Cultures of Dissent / Cultures graphiques de la contestation is the result of three years’ research devoted to the artistic, militant and counter-cultural printed matter from the 1960s and 1970s.

Initiated in 2021 by Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, Mica Gherghescu and Thomas Bertail, this research project’s aim is to promote the artistic, activist and counter-cultural ephemera of the 1960s and 1970s held by the Kandinsky Library. Published by the Centre Pompidou and the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, it is the result of collaboration between international partners: Stuart Hall at INIVA in London, the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis, the Beaux-arts de Paris, La Contemporaine, the Freedom Archives in San Francisco and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles (CSPG).

At the same time, the project has enabled an educational programme to be set up for students from the Paris Beaux-Arts and the University of Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis, encouraging them to appropriate this heritage in order to breathe new life into the critical force of ephemera. Through creative and collaborative workshops involving students and their teachers, this approach has encouraged an active and contemporary exploration of these sources.

One of the main design challenge was to reflect the aesthetics of the militant publications of the 1968s without compromising the legibility of the content, the documentation of the archive or the coherence of the publication. The aim was to bring out in places the characteristic expressiveness of the Free Press press without lapsing into pastiche.
This balance between functionalism and extravagance is reflected in the typographic choices made, with the use of EB Trainer by Antoine Elsensohn and Times Dot by Laurel Schwulst.