Belgisch Instituut
Grafisch Ontwerp

Introduction

The guiding thread of this text unfolds around the idea of affect as a driving force of creation in graphic design. This personal vision of graphic design is traversed by emotions that make it political and situated — whether it be anger, love, care, or militant joy. In this sense, affect acts as a relational motor: it binds, upsets, organizes aesthetic and political alliances — what Sara Ahmed, queer and postcolonial feminist theorist, calls an “emotional orientation¹,” that is to say, a way for bodies and signs to turn toward one another in a social space. Graphic design, thus affected and affecting, becomes a terrain of creation in movement, crossed by tensions, pleasures, angers: a zone where love and rage coexist.

My practice is inscribed at the intersection of graphic design, post-binary typography, teaching, and research. It unfolds in a fluid movement between creation, transmission, and critical reflection, following a logic of affinity. This weaving anchors itself in a network of chosen and/or partial alliances, of sensitive complicities and collective dynamics.

In this article, I will focus on projects that escape the traditional framework of commission in graphic design. These creations, mostly arising from collective initiatives, allowed me to explore freer forms of expression, released from the usual constraints imposed by commissioners This approach is part of a broader reflection on the role of the graphic designer in society. By distancing myself here from the dynamics of commission — which I practice within the studio Kidnap Your Designer — I seek to question the possibilities of a graphic design allowing for new representations, motivated by personal commitments and collective dynamics, rather than by external expectations. This exploration leads me to reconsider the relationships between the designer, the commissioner, and the public, and to imagine new modes of graphic creation, more in phase with my convictions and aspirations. The economy of these productions is precarious, stemming from invitations with modest budgets, from grants or subsidies. It is the articulation between my different graphic practices that allows for this fragile balance. I am aware that this freedom of creation rests on material conditions that are difficult to put in place for every graphic designer.

This text is marked by typo·graphic productions whose creative momentum is carried by love, rage — or the tension between the two. Two forces, often perceived as opposed but which I refuse to think of in binary terms. The one as much as the other passes through me, intersects, infiltrates, nourishes my commitments and my graphic forms. Rage is born in the face of systemic violence, excluding norms, dominant narratives — it pushes me to deconstruct, to question, to reinvent my practice of typo·graphic design. Love, for its part, supports, connects, creates spaces of listening, care, collective invention. Together, in their porous, moving, non-hierarchical interactions, they constitute vectors of attention, resistance, and desire. They animate a graphic gesture that seeks as much to create rupture as to create connection.

Zie says I love you (Iel te dit je t’aime) 

❤ With the project Iel te dit je t’aime (Zie says I love you), I call upon type designers. The typographic intervention consists in adding a single glyph, “zie,” into already existing fonts, whether open-licensed or proprietary. The multiplication of these interventions aims to incite the many type designers, including those a priori less sensitive to these issues, to become aware of the stakes of post-binary typography and to expand their character sets. Inclusive, non-binary, post-binary typography makes use of new typographic characters, primarily in the form of new ligatures (i·e, l·e, f·e, x·se, r·e, f·v…). It also uses existing typographic signs by diverting them from their primary uses (*, @, ә) in order to de-binarize the particularly gendered French language.

This interpellation with a positive message of love is also an intrusion, an abordage as a strategy of gentle, even piratical disruption. By inserting this ligature into often normative typographic systems, I invite attention to the apparent neutrality of typography, which is in reality traversed by cultural, linguistic, and political norms.

It is a form of affective address: saying “I love you,” while reaffirming the existence of identities often erased from the language (all with a touch of humor and kitsch, since the phrase echoes, for those who remember, the sentimental ‘80s ballad Mon cœur te dit je t’aime by Frédéric François). The project illustrates how typographic experiments can become gestures of love, care, and recognition — pollinating the very tools of design with an affective and political charge. Zie says I love you activates this dynamic by making affect visible. This approach resonates with bell hooks, who describes love as an active practice of transformation, capable of breaking the patriarchal and binary logics of domination. The “zie” glyph, slipped into the interstices of a font, thus embodies a militant gesture of love, a point of support for reconfiguring typographic possibilities. It is not merely about adding a sign, but about making space for subjectivities often absent from the typographic field — an invitation to rethink the typographic sign as a political territory.

Love & Rage

It is thanks to the director Dominique Lohlé that I began a very special relationship with this slogan: Love & Rage. A colleague at erg (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), close to anarchist circles, he signed every one of his emails with this motto. As I read it repeatedly, I ended up making it my own — almost by affective contagion. RAGE is also the title of a film made by Dominique, mixing rave parties, acid techno, joyous chaos, and a vital instinct for life. RAGE is also a film about the ways one can respond to violence — sometimes — with another form of violence. After Dom’s far too early death, these words took on a new weight. I now sign my emails the same way he did. The words Love & Rage later spread within the Bye Bye Binary collective, appearing in certain creations²: an active memory, a relay of affinities, a persistent presence. Vinciane Despret writes that “the dead are not absent, they are present in another way” and, especially, that “they make us do things”.³  In my case, this inherited slogan caused my practice to shift, connected me to a militant and sensitive genealogy, and pushed me to make, build, and give form in the momentum of a living memory.

Love & Rage is in fact a political and poetic motto stemming from the history of North American anarchist, feminist, and queer movements. Popularized in the 1990s by the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, this motto affirms a double attachment: love for justice, community, and freedom; and rage against oppression, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.⁴ Today, this slogan is also used, among others, by the international ecological social movement Extinction Rebellion.

Taken up in radical feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-institutional struggles, the rallying cry Love & Rage embodies a way of connecting emotion with politics. However, this articulation is not without ambivalence. Sara Ahmed questions love not as a simple private feeling, but as a socially and politically structuring affect. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, she shows that love can act as a powerful mechanism of collective alignment — it creates belonging, certainly, but can just as easily exclude those judged inassimilable.⁵ Ahmed thus highlights the reactionary uses of love, particularly in nationalist, familialist, or xenophobic discourses: acts conducted in the name of love for the nation, tradition, or culture are used to justify borders and exclusions.

In the face of such instrumentalization, Ahmed calls for mistrust of love as the foundation of a political project: “There is no good love that, in speaking its name, can change the world into the referent for that name.” Love, even well-intentioned, always comes with its own conditions of inclusion and exclusion. She proposes to shift attention towards an affective solidarity — a form of emotional commitment based on mutual feelings of care and concern, where each person expects the other to behave in a way that allows them to be recognized and affirmed as a concrete being, with specific needs and capacities. She takes up this concept from political philosopher Jodi Dean⁶, who has also theorized reflexive solidarity, another approach that recognizes and incorporates openness to conflict, dissension, and the possibility of being wrong. This approach insists on the necessity of an openness to difference, allowing disagreements to become the very foundation of the connection between individuals.

But then, must we no longer believe in love? As Ahmed puts it: “If love does not shape our political visions, it does not mean we should not love the visions we have”.⁷ In this view, loving a political project does not mean denying its limitations, but rather investing in its potential, while remaining critical of what it produces.

In a similar vein, bell hooks explores its transformative potential in All About Love, conceiving love as an act of resistance: a conscious, political, and reparative practice that breaks with affective hierarchies and normalized violence.⁸ Feminist theorist, African American author, and activist, bell hooks dedicated her work to thinking about domination and the connections between race, gender, and class, placing emphasis on the role of love, care, and community in struggles for liberation. In hooks’ vision, love becomes the verb “to love”, an active way to rethink our relationships with others from a radically emancipatory and anticolonial perspective, it’s a desire to expand oneself by combining care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honesty, and open communication. This is only on the condition, perhaps, that it is never detached from an ethics of doubt and vigilance, as formulated by Ahmed, in order to avoid the pitfalls of false kindness, charitable love, and supposed good feelings that maintain existing relations of power.

And what about rage? In many contexts, the expression of minority anger — especially that expressed by trans, racialized, and precarious people — is met with a normative requirement for emotional restraint. People with cis, white, or bourgeois privileges often have the means, and sometimes the interest, to control emotions, silence anger, and discipline rage. This process of affective regulation often takes the form of an injunction to kindness, which becomes a tool for maintaining order. “We are not all capable of kindness in every situation. We do not all have access to the ability to produce an audible and polite discourse of anger. […] The perpetual incitement to extinguish one’s anger is akin to extinguishing our lived experiences and corporealities, and this hegemonic mechanism only serves to silence victims”.⁹ In this sense, reclaiming rage, not as a loss of control, but as a form of situated knowledge and embodied resistance, becomes both a political act and a reparative gesture.

The Isolated Genius

🔥 As part of the Festival Extra! #6 at the Centre Pompidou in September 2022, the Bye Bye Binary collective presented a series of nine posters for the exhibition Batailles typographiques, designed by duos from within the collective or invited participants. These posters act both as specimens of post-binary typographic experimentation and as graphic manifestos of the angers running through the collective. Among them, I created the poster The Isolated Genius in collaboration with Tristan Bartolini, which responds to a collective wound. In 2020, a press article credited Tristan with the invention of the “first inclusive typeface,” silencing the collaborative and prior work of Bye Bye Binary and many other type designers.¹⁰

Tristan had constantly worked to re-establish the timeline of the work and to soften the cascading effects that followed the poorly researched publication in Tribune de Genève, but the article had nevertheless spread across many media outlets. This media narrative erased the collective dynamics in favor of the figure of the “isolated genius,” reactivating patriarchal logics from art history.

A few years later, the context of this exhibition for Festival Extra! was a perfect opportunity to invite Tristan to participate with us, to revisit that episode together and close the loop. This poster took the form of a graphic angry, ironic, and jubilant response to reveal historical distortions. Research into post-binary typographies comes from a long lineage of grapho-linguistic interventions that we inherit, and not from a “gift fallen from the sky,” as the poster puts it. The text emphasizes the collective nature of the movement, led by a “pack of famous typo·graphers.” In this context, anger becomes a creative energy, a critical tool, and a symbolic reconfiguration vector to contest dominant narratives and reclaim erased histories.

Heterocops, give us a break with passing (Hétéroflics lâchez-nous le passing)

🔥 During the group exhibition Subversif·ves, graphic design, gender & power at the Mudac, I had the opportunity to collaborate with H·Alix Sanyas within Bye Bye Binary on a flag titled Hétéroflics, lâchez-nous le passing (Heterocops, give us a break with passing). This piece embodies a raw rage, the kind born from exasperation in the face of the incessant pressure of gender norms. We are addressing a critique of the expectations imposed by society concerning “passing,” a term that designates a person’s ability to be perceived as belonging to a gender. “Passing” therefore implies constant social control over physical appearance, like a form of validation or invalidation dictated by the binary norms of the regime of sexual difference, which can resemble a form of gender policing. The message is clear: give us a break with passing as a demand for freedom, for a refusal of the physical and identity-based control imposed by a cis-hetero-normative society and its bio- and necro-politics. Rage reactivates a force of resistance not to repeat resentment, but to build a space of affirmation and indignation, where rage is transformed into an aesthetic and political act that redefines our relationships to the world.

As Sara Ahmed notes, anger is not an isolated emotion but a “social energy” that can “redefine power relations and affirmation”¹¹ in societies dominated by excluding norms. For bell hooks, anger is a necessary response to injustices experienced, an anger that, when channeled, becomes creative and reparative. It allows us to rethink our relationships to society and to others.¹²

Affective Genealogy

Drawing on the writings of Isabelle Alfonsi in Pour une esthétique de l’émancipation, I conceive of my position in the field of graphic design as a gesture of critical filiation. Alfonsi writes: “Bringing to light a lineage of artists one could claim kinship with is also taking power over one’s own narration. It is refusing to be assigned to a history that does not include us.”¹³ It is not simply a matter of honoring past figures, but of carrying out a work of affective memory: making sensitive, political, and aesthetic continuities appear within practices often marginalized or scattered.

This idea of lineage is inscribed in a conception of love as a transformative relation, as bell hooks formulates it. In this perspective, claiming chosen filiations — queer, feminist, collective — becomes a way of loving: of honoring, of connecting, of continuing. It is not only about transmission, but about affective engagement in a shared history.

What hooks describes in a political language of intimacy, Lucy Lippard translates as a “geography of affective relations”: maps where places, works, and people form an emotionally situated network.¹⁴ Rethinking one’s place in a history of art or graphic design thus also means situating oneself in an affective territory, populated with chosen presences, aesthetic solidarities, and discreet forms of resistance.

This relational fabric becomes both a support and a motor of creation. In the field of graphic design, it can open the path toward a situated, affective practice, breaking with narratives of autonomy, neutrality, or universality that still largely dominate training and discourse.

A new world (Un·e mond·e nouvelle·au)

❤ In this affective and political cartography, the work of Monique Wittig — to which I was introduced thanks to Roxanne Maillet’s reading group — holds a place of choice. I feel myself heir·ess to her thought and her literary experimentations, notably The Straight Mind, where she dismantles the heterosexual structures that organize language, narrative, and power.But it is also through her pronominal choices — like the pronoun “on”¹⁵ in L’Opoponax — that Wittig inspires me, even into my practice of typographic design. For it is there that a fertile shift takes place: by extending her critique of gender into the graphic space, the pronoun becomes not only a linguistic figure but a plastic object, a sign to détour, redraw, encode.

It is in this spirit that we created, with Eugénie Bidaut, the flag Un·e mond·e nouvelle·au (A new world) in 2023, on the occasion of the twenty-year anniversary of Monique Wittig’s death. This project, carried by the collective Bye Bye Binary, is part of a series of three flags exhibited at the Department of French at the University of Berkeley and at the art and research center Bétonsalon in Paris. In our proposal, we infiltrated the text Les Guérillères by replacing the “elles” with “iels”, composed using ligatures from the typeface BBB Baskervvol. It is not a matter of denaturing the force of Wittig’s text by inserting the masculine (“ils”) into the feminine (“elles”), but on the contrary, of participating in the abolition of genders in language, an undertaking that Wittig never ceased to pursue in order to allow a new world to begin.

The pronoun can become a flag. Typography, like language, can carry desires for emancipation. And may this lineage with Wittig, far from being a simple reference, constitute an affective and political transmission, a relay.

Catalogue of Post-Binary Font Usages

❤   At the crossroads of graphic attention and affective gesture, we carried out in 2023, with the support of a grant from the Art Research Fund, a collective archival project focused on the uses of post-binary fonts. Together with Enz@ Le Garrec, Sophie Vela, and Laure Giletti, we assembled a catalogue gathering more than a hundred printed materials — posters, specimens, fanzines, flyers, editorial objects, marble imprints — bearing witness to the diversity of graphic practices that have incorporated post-binary typographic signs. This act of collection, accessible at typo-inclusive.net, was not driven by a desire for exhaustive classification or neutral archiving. It was a gesture of care, an attention paid to every form, every use. Each document was scanned, captioned, and indexed with precision.

This project was suffused with a form of love — for the graphic traces we encountered, for the people who produced them, for the sometimes discreet circulations of these signs in the margins of typographic usage. The catalogue opens up a space of living, sensitive, evolving transmission. It is anchored in a tradition of situated archives, such as the Queer Zine Archive Project, launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them accessible to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone interested in DIY publishing and underground queer communities. In this perspective, this work also resonates with the approach of Paul Soulellis, who conceives queer archiving as an affective and critical act — a “queer editorial form” attentive to minor narratives, to the fragility of traces, and to the performativity of their circulation.¹⁶

The documents gathered in the Catalogue of Post-Binary Font Usages are not exclusively queer or militant. They reflect a plurality of approaches, motivations, and contexts, attesting to the richness and complexity of possible appropriations. Through this project, we sought to bring forth an affective memory of typographic gestures, a memory that does not impose a single reading, but that allows for recognition, connection, and transmission.

Liefhebben in het Nederlands

❤ The graphic gestures I develop often take root in situated relationships, shaped by affect and daily exchange. It was in the wake of a romantic relationship — a relationship marked by the sharing of daily life, of languages, of readings, of struggles — that I was drawn to the linguistic questions of Dutch. This language, which I do not master but which I live alongside intimately, confronted me with other grammatical systems, other blind spots in gender. Carried by ongoing conversations with my partner, Amber Vanluffelen, artist, performer, and visual editor of Rekto Verso magazine, we began a process of research and creation around post-binary typographic symbols adapted to the Dutch language. This research, later expanded within Bye Bye Binary, took on public forms, notably through collaborations with Dutch-speaking institutions such as the Beursschouwburg and Kaaitheater in Brussels. The project also broadened through contributions from linguist Vief Cornelissen and læ poet and translator neneh noï, whose input helped open the work to other linguistic, critical, and situated perspectives. Though embedded in a collective dynamic, this process resonates with what Sara Ahmed writes: “we do what we do because certain things touch us, move us, compel us into motion.”¹⁷ Language becomes, here, a site of attention and invention, a terrain where the intimate and the political are constantly being negotiated.

Writing in Fire

🔥 Rage is often, for me, the catalyst for speaking out. It is a situated, collective, transformative anger — not aimed at individuals, but at systems, structures, institutions that perpetuate forms of symbolic violence, marginalization, or appropriation. This rage fuels a practice of writing texts that often arise from tensions, conflicts, and friction, and aim to document, challenge, and transform. It was in this spirit that I wrote, with an additional contribution from Félixe Kazi-Tani, a first manifesto addressed to the institutions that invite the collective. One passage clearly lays down a refusal of any tokenistic co-optation: “BYE BYE BINARY is not a queer varnish on the shit that surrounds us.¹⁸ Bye Bye Binary is not at your service. Bye Bye Binary is not merely functional. Bye Bye Binary is Love & Rage.” More than a kindly reminder, it’s a way of marking a political stand, of asserting the weight of a minority voice and the conditions necessary for its reception.

This manifesto, Ces colères qui nous honorent, accompanied by a text co-written with Axxenne and Enz@ Le Garrec, was published in the journal Festina Lente.¹⁹ It responded to forms of erasure, appropriation, or neglect. The manifesto unfolds with painful lucidity a series of lived situations, each time concluding with a phrase that functions like a reparative mantra: “Our rage honors us.” Here, rage becomes a form of political and affective self-legitimization, a refusal of erasure and dispossession.