Feminist Publishing: Storytelling and Spacemakin

How can design, craft, architecture, and spatial practice act in relation to present issues of crisis and conflicts? What role does different modes of practice, spaces and infrastructures have in responding to global challenges – from climate change and ecological collapses, geopolitical and economic crisis and displacement of people to issues of democracy, social justice and equality?

In this gathering we explore design and feminist publishing as strategies for knowledge production and making spaces to meet, share, and imagine possible futures together. Presentations by Nina Paim and Sara Kaaman, introduction and moderation by Magnus Ericson.

Photo: Matilde Cunha

Various books edited, designed, or with essays by Nina Paim, 2016 – 2024

Publishing viewed as a practice beyond production and distribution of publications may act as spaces that facilitate critical and transformative thinking, and support practices of care and solidarity. Feminist and intersectional strategies problematise, and break dominating powers and hierarchies, and make possible a more diverse understanding of inequity. Within design, this opens up for underrepresented knowledge, histories and marginalised voices to come forward, and hence a broader understanding of practice and how it participates in the world. What role and potential may design, as an artistic practice, have in developing these strategies and spaces, and what are the methods, possibilities and challenges here? What impact may these strategies have on a local scale as well as seen from a broader perspective?

Designer, publisher and founder of Bikini Books, Nina Paim, introduces the book ABC of Feminist Publishing, (forthcoming in autumn 2026) that builds on Abécédaire d’auto-édition féministe, written by Apolline and Clémentine Labrosse and published in 2024. It’s structured as a friendly glossary with 90 entries, covering writing, editing, and designing, but also sales, legal structures, distribution, as well as consent, care, collaboration, and the many political actions, large and small, that help bring feminist voices into the world. Rather than a direct translation, ABC of Feminist Publishing is conceived as an editorial experiment, operating through practices of re-editing, layering, and re-situating, and treating publishing itself as a feminist method of knowledge production. It is grounded in the simple conviction that there is no single, unified, inherently “feminist” way of publishing, but many. Here, feminism is not a fixed noun but a verb—a practice. Sara Kaaman will introduce the book Love & Lightning – A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos, published in 2025 by Valiz, and Girls Like Us Magazine. The book is the result of a long-term, sprawling research process by the feminist and queer cultural magazine Girls Like Us and different collaborators along the way. Thematically ordered, the book is an inconclusive collection of queer and feminist manifestos, using wide definitions of both terms. Girls Like Us and author/editor Sarah van Binsbergen have composed a publication which showcases the many different logics a manifesto can hold, gathering manifestos across borders, forms, disciplines and politics. As a member of the editorial team of Girls Like Us – as well as its graphic designer since 2012 – Sara will share thoughts on the strengths and stumbling blocks of sustaining a feminist publishing project that has been active since 2006.

Nina Paim is a Brazilian designer, curator, editor, and publisher based in Porto, Portugal. She has co-curated numerous exhibitions, workshops, and events, including Escola Aberta (Rio de Janeiro, 2012), Swiss Design Network Conference: Beyond Change (Basel, 2018), Department of Non-Binaries (Sharjah, 2018), Feminist Findings (Berlin, 2020), Etceteras: Feminist Festival of Publishing and Design (Porto, 2023), and most recently Comunoteca, part of the public program of the 4th Porto Design Biennale (Porto, 2025). She has co-edited Taking a Line for a Walk (Spector Books, 2016) and Design Struggles (Valiz, 2021). A three-time recipient of the Swiss Design Awards, Nina has taught and lectured internationally, and her writing has appeared in numerous publications. In 2019, she co-founded the feminist platform FUTURESS.org, which she co-directed until 2023. That same year, she launched Bikini Books, an independent feminist publisher for design. In 2024, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London (UAL). Nina is currently artist in residence at IASPIS.

Sara Kaaman is a Stockholm-based graphic designer and artist. Her practice explores the intersections of publishing, performance and print technologies. Working from embodied and feminist approaches to design, she examines publishing as a transformative and liberatory action, shaping meaning through materiality, embodiment and collective processes. She is a longtime member of Girls Like Us, a queer feminist magazine that merges art, politics, and pleasure, and co-organises Munnen. She is also part of MMS, a research collective tracing labour histories of womxn in graphic design. In 2020, she co-edited Natural Enemies of Books – A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography. Trained in graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and holding an MFA in Choreography from Stockholm University of the Arts, her practice challenges traditional design methodologies, embracing notions of improvisation, liveness, collaborative production and performative publishing.

Magnus Ericson is Head of Applied arts IASPIS, responsible for IASPIS’ programme related to design, craft, architecture, spatial and urban practice.

​Feminist Publishing: Storytelling and Spacemaking is the second in a new series of public events at IASPIS organised as part of Practice Matters, a project exploring design, craft, architecture, and spatial practice and its ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts. The project is developed in collaboration between IASPIS and Salt.