Disquieting histories Notes on silence in the graphic design archive

The preservation of works of graphic design and their accompanying documentation is undoubtedly important, especially for a medium whose materiality is inherently ephemeral. But why is it that the graphic design archive continues to be dominated by an operative conception of the practice as a product of late-capitalist Global North industrial democracies, and the work and worldviews of: the white, male, solo artist-designer who specialised in printed publications and posters?
This lecture is part of the base-camp-preparation for a research project which seeks to better understand the role of design history in negotiating the relationship between graphic design as heritage and graphic design as contemporary professional practice. It leans on perspectives and dispositions derived from decolonial aesthesis and intersectional feminism being used to question and disrupt representational biases and imbalances in cultural heritage preservation generally, and explores how such theories and tactics might also support renewed attention to the graphic design archive, specifically.
With reference to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation and Rolando Vázquez’s advocacy for practices of listening and relationality, for example, the project wants to posit a range of ways in which the design historian, as the intended consumer of an archive, might critically intervene in its mechanisms of collection and description, and thereby participate in the collective effort to unsettle the archive as a globally dispersed entity. Through a practice of ‘disquieting’, Professor Twemlow hopes that new pathways can be walked connecting the past, present and future of graphic design practice and its cultural historical interpretations.