Feminist Findings

posted by Robyn Pitts August 27, 2020

Feminist Findings brings together twenty-three stories by womxn and non-binary people on unknown histories of feminist publishing. It’s the first project by Futuress, a new feminist publishing platform founded by Nina Paim and Corin Gisel (of the Basel-based design research practice common-interest), alongside journalist and editor Madeleine Morley. The authors of Feminist Findings, a.k.a the L.i.P. Collective (short for Liberation in Print), came together remotely during lockdown. Across four continents and many time zones, its members collaborated via their computers to dig through digital archives, searching for the missing histories of feminist journals, magazines, zines, newspapers, and newsletters. Feminist Findings presents the L.i.P. Collective’s research for the first time, taking the form of a zine and exhibition held at Berlin’s A—Z Presents gallery until the 24th September 2020.

Meeting remotely every Wednesday during the early months of social distancing to share and discuss individual research findings, the global group of multidisciplinary strangers, which included artists, graphic designers, writers, educators, type designers, publishers, social anthropologists, students, and more, became a tightly-knit research unit. In recent years, through the efforts of many archivist- activists, more and more feminist periodicals are digitised and available online. 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.

The Feminist Findings brightly coloured, Riso printed zine presents their collective research. Inside, you’ll hear from the co-founder of India’s first feminist press, meet the tight-knit community behind a 1980s San Francisco newsletter for Asian/Pacific lesbians, learn of the subversive logo of a 1930s Tunisian feminist journal, discover how swinging sixties women’s titles Nova and Spare Rib made their impacts on the newsstands, and more. The cover combines all of the logos from every mag or periodical discussed inside. Each contributor has also designed their own page, using a different typeface by a womxn or BIPOC type designer and printed in varied colours in order to further emphasise the different voices contained in the pages, and how with difference comes strength. The zine presents articles and essays on the labour, loves, networks, hierarchies, friendships, fall-outs, struggles, victories, economics, designs, and daily lives of womxn in the past working out what it might mean to organise a feminist praxis. From the late 1960s onward, 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.

Currently on show at A—Z Presents in Berlin, Germany, the exhibition is a wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) 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, showcasing fragments from the L.i.P. Collective’s research journey into the history of twentieth century feminist publishing around the world. Its objects function as extended footnotes to the 23 articles authored by L.i.P. members, and are scattered around the gallery as if having leapt straight out of the zine’s pages.

Feminist Findings, which the Futuress team has worked with the authors to craft into accessible storytelling formats, will be republished online via Futuress this upcoming autumn, adhering to its guiding philosophy of making design research public.