“The Feminist Findings Zine Uncovers Forgotten Histories of Feminist Publishing” by Ritupriya Basu.
Basu, according to her “About” page on her online portfolio, is a writer and design researcher/analyst/enthusiast located in India. Her work has been featured in many respectable publications (some online and some physical publications), including: Platform Magazine, SOFA, AIGA Eye on Design, and Intern Magazine. On her LinkedIn page it states she received a Bachelor of Design in Fashion Communication from Symbiosis Institute of Design. She’s written a lot about design, and has quite an extensive portfolio of articles, so she definitely has a good sense of concept and what to write about. I find her pretty trustworthy to uncover and talk us through design discoveries and featuring the work of others.
In this article for AIGA Eye on Design, Basu talks about the zine Feminist Findings, and how this zine goes through the history of early 20th century periodicals. This zine, and its articles and essays, was created by 26 womxn and non-binary people, through a group called Liberation in Print (L.i.P for short) Collective. Basu explains this group formed in the beginning of the pandemic, and it was “initiated by le Signe the National du Graphisme in Chaumont, France”. This project is also the first project of Futuress, which is a community created by the mentors from the workshop, Corin Gisel and Nina Paim. Each member of L.i.P researched a feminist periodical, then shared it with the group. They created this zine from their research, which they got from digital archives. This process of doing research remotely proved to be mostly okay, except the lack of not being able to go into a physical space like a library proved to be difficult when trying to include publications from marginalized people. Not only are there fewer publications because of a lack of these being archived, but a lot of them aren’t archived in a digital way. When designing the actual zine, each member of the collective designed their own spread to show off their research, and the different typefaces used were designed specifically by womxn. The research is also shown in an exhibition in A-Z in Berlin.
Basu, Ritupriya. “The Feminist Findings Zine Uncovers Forgotten Histories of Feminist Publishing.” Eye on Design, AIGA, 15 Sept. 2020, eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-feminist-findings-zine-uncovers-forgotten-histories-of-feminist-publishing/.
