6 ½ Wochen: Rietlanden Women's Office

There is an homage in the title Banners for Heresies, both towards the New York based feminist magazine Heresies (1977–93) and to the word heresy itself. A word Johanna Ehde and Elisabeth Rafstedt of Rietlanden Women’s Office (RWO) borrow to describe their graphic design methods, where they collect and reactivate design elements, print methods, and work processes stemming from a graphic design history formed within an international feminist struggle opposed to capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy.

As part of their collaborative graphic design practice, RWO works with archival material of historical feminist publications from the so-called print activist movement (late 60s to early 90s). Here they see a feminism based in the material, where owning their means of production, themselves writing, designing, and printing — and sharing these roles — created layered printed matter with visual traces of the material conditions of their making. In these traces — lines of alterations and corrections, frames, clashing elements, flowers, and improvised type — RWO sees urgent, disruptive, or hidden political gestures. This designerly research is self-published in their printed series MsHeresies which takes the form of elaborate graphic design compositions printed in a colourful iris offset-technique.

The textile banners are the result of a collaborative process of layout and manual printing. Their interest in formats, composition, and the painterly, come together in monotype printing and digital sublimation of their writing. Writing that outlines a collective feminist practice and that is edited with embroidery and markers, underlining the trial and error aspect of their print-making, designing, and publishing. 

Johanna Ehde (*1987, SE) and Elisabeth Rafstedt (*1986, SE) live in Amsterdam where they formed Rietlanden Women’s Office in 2018. Both are graduates from the Graphic Design department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and together they guest teach in book design and typography at various institutions around Europe.