Productive Misunderstandings: an Interview with Sandy Kaltenborn
Interview by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo
2021
Alexander Sandy Kaltenborn is the founder of the graphic design and visual communication studio Image-Shift, based in Berlin. Image-Shift’s work has been a long standing source of inspiration for me, something I return to when I feel in doubt about our own practice. I first met Sandy at the Declarations of Interdependence and the Immediacy of Design Conference in Montreal in 2001. Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with each other a few more times in various cities across the world due to our mutual collaborations with Memefest. Though those meetings were all-too brief and far apart, the intensity of the context nurtured a close and lasting friendship. This interview was conducted over Zoom during the pandemic fall of 2020, when we were both longing for a little more connection.
Kevin Lo: Hi Sandy! I wanted to start by asking you about the 13-point non-manifesto, which has been a foundational document that’s helped guide my practice over the years. I’ve also taught it in classes and have wanted to know a bit more about its context and origins. What made you decide to draft it and how was it received? How do you feel looking back on the points you made now, 10 years later?
Sandy Kaltenborn: I believe I wrote down these thirteen points as a late reaction to the First Things First manifesto, which was referred to as some kind of guideline on values for designers that people were highly relating to all over the world. Since a lot of the design and advertising companies which my former partner Pierre [Maite] and I saw as our… not enemies, but contrary parts in the field of design, were signing the manifesto, we felt like it was a hoax. Just a cheap thing to sign onto with no further effects. So, a couple years after First Things First 2000 came out, we had the feeling it was important to draft something like this.
The idea was –– and still is –– to give younger designers a kind of orientation, and to make a point from the perspective of our studio, since a lot of design teaching is very market and service oriented. There’s the whole field of political graphic design, which is very much image and activism related, but not so much around the general values and practices of how we work and the kind of beliefs behind our work.
Looking at it today, I have the feeling most of these points circle around values in production, how we treat images, and how we understand our profession, but not so much on the impacts design actually has. A lot is still related to image politics for instance, and not so much about real social change.
My perspective really changed again with the studio’s work with Kotti & Co over the last few years, and my engagement in the Right to the City movement. It drifted away from discourse work, which is still very important –– and a big chunk of our design work is building discourses, getting images into these discourses, flanking them, or visualizing complex things –– but with Kotti & Co, the studio work shifted into a more material field. It was not about saying “this is wrong”, but to really actually change things, it was ingrained into an actual battle. So, if I were to rewrite or extend it today, I would add the whole field of social design, materialized design, strategic design, and campaign design.
Kevin: When we last met at Memefest, you told me that your work with Kotti & Co was taking up so much of your time that you didn’t even feel like a designer anymore. How does your design work relate to your neighbourhood organizing work and how are things in Kreuzberg now?
Sandy: That’s a big question, we’re still in the midst of a big struggle, of course. I’d been running the studio for more than fifteen years when I started the tenant initiative Kotti & Co. The studio was always very political and very socially engaged, so we had great clients, great projects, work that really made sense. We were always on the same level as our clients and not doing any advertising or wrapping up things we didn’t believe in.
But the majority of this work was discourse work, flanking bigger issues with design and images and so on, one project after the other. With Kotti & Co, this changed because it was not about saying something’s wrong with the high rent, but in the very first place about lowering the rent and changing the laws and the city. It was about building new programs for social housing and actually pushing the government and the administration to direct millions and millions of Euros into buying buildings back from private investors. This new practice was beyond design and also beyond protest.
Generally, I would say that running a studio is not only about designing, it’s really all the administrative work, meeting people — you need to be part of something bigger to run a studio — and most of the work in a design studio is invisible. And in the struggle of anti-gentrification, in the field of social housing and community work especially, a lot of it is not productive design work. A lot of it is having time with neighbours, sitting down, listening to stories, being part of these stories, and then building up these exchanges into discourse and into design form later on, for the struggle and real change.
So, the actual graphic design work has become a much smaller fraction of the work. I would call what we do here to be more communication design or strategic design or maybe even social design –– but with a very deep interdependency and less distinction between the client and the designer. As I became my own client and the community became the designer, with both sides actually working for a bigger goal, I believe most of my neighbours don’t see me as a designer, they see me as a neighbour. A neighbour who is active in the field of fighting these developments of gentrification and the drama in social housing. Which is interesting, as having a designer identity seems to still be very important for most people in our profession.
The specific design work today is less about the one piece we design, and more about a stream, a strategic field where several media formats all merge together in this larger struggle for social change. Doing this for a longer period of time is fulfilling, as we can see how our designs connect over time to a stream of communication and so they build a much larger narrative than one design product could ever do.
So in this neighbourhood the larger thing we’re working on is building a narrative which includes a lot of different perspectives. This is a super diverse neighbourhood with a lot of different political backgrounds, sexual backgrounds, beliefs, religions, and so on. There are very conservative, right wing people, even Turkish people who believe in AKP and Erdogan, there’s radical leftist people, there’s elderly people, students, young kids in school, so-called migrants, so-called Germans, subculture, counterculture, artists. So, we’re trying to build a meta-narrative, which is kind of like building a roof for everyone ––not a dominant roof, but an open and inviting roof that everyone can get underneath and find shelter.
I believe it’s very important to do so, because as we see throughout Germany and Europe the public field has become very fragmented. But in a democracy, we need a common ground where we can negotiate conflicts. Besides struggle and power, there’s always enlightenment and negotiation and discourse, but if these fields of discourse are so fragmented in so many different media formats and places, then things become a problem. So on a very local level here in my neighbourhood, we’re trying to build up this common meta-narrative, and I believe that a lot of design practices are very valuable for this work.
Kevin: On the flip side though, Berlin is also seen as a global creative city, and design plays a big part in that. What role do you see design playing in gentrification and displacement?
Sandy: I believe that design plays a role everywhere. There’s barely any field in our society and daily life which is completely detached from design work. It’s on every product we hold in our hands, it’s on every communicative format which is circulating between us. Design is involved in this gentrification process by building up images of what a city should look like.
What I find very interesting and sad, is that a lot of images from let’s say, cafes in gentrified neighbourhoods, with the kinds of cafe aesthetics and charcoal typography I’ve seen in Canada, the US, and so many other cities, you now see exactly the same aesthetics here in Berlin. It’s all this kind of cool and hip and urban and young and fresh and creative image, but at the same time, people are craving something more down to earth, non-designed, and “authentic”.
I wouldn’t say that design is the problem at its core, it’s more the economy and the market which is behind the design. Generally, you can see that on one side there’s this proposal from let’s say the real estate and housing market industry and its politics are more the conservative, the right wing, to propose an image of a city which is basically money driven. And you can see this in the architectural billboards where they build new condominiums, new houses; you can see these bodies and how they are designed and how they function. From my perspective, these are not real bodies because there’s no problems attached to them, and of course bodies have problems attached to them as life bears a lot of problems.
So the other side of the question is what kind of images we put in the field of resistance and social change. What kind of images we can put out to counter these market-driven city images, for instance. What we see in the radical left is all this imagery of resistance, which I believe is pretty boring. Maybe it’s important, but the radical left is just a very marginal group within a city. Even in Berlin which is a capital of the radical left, we’re talking about maybe a couple thousand people, maybe ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand –– let it be fifty thousand people in Berlin, but we have nearly four million people living here, so it’s a very very marginal aesthetic field. I believe that as designers we should work on a much larger field and include more imagery. It’s important to do a little bit of investigation on what images of urban life look like when they’re not money driven. What do uncommercial, uncommodified bodies look like? Can we imagine uncommodified bodies, and how do we bring these images into circulation? The advertising field was, until let’s say the 90’s, mostly about style. It was about the product, it was about image and so on, and over the last couple decades, we see that capitalist culture is interfering more and more into social life and trying to capture these social relationships and to impose value on them, bring them into the market, commodify them. I believe that’s an ongoing struggle and that design plays a very big role in these processes.
Kevin: This makes me think of the video I sent you of the girls dancing in the gazebo in the park. The event we organized was part of a project around community housing and anti-gentrification in this neighbourhood in Montreal called Park Extension. It’s a similar neighbourhood to Kreuzberg. And the project started as a housing project, but it’s grown into this really full-on community organizing, not necessarily in a political sense, but just trying to get people to know each other, talk to each other, share their concerns, and bring together all the different community organizations. And so we had a couple of these events at that park and it makes me think of the spot you built in Kreuzberg: a physical place where people can gather and discuss.
Sandy: It’s super important to have real physical meetings. To tell our stories, to meet, see, learn, and to be open to irritations and complexity. This seems to be a big problem for activists because they want to turn every story and every notion into a political agenda, and is the reason why I wouldn’t even call myself an activist.
Kevin: That’s exactly it! Like there’s a big tension in many ways between the racialized immigrant communities that we’re working with and the white anarcho hardcore organizers, where it’s like, no… we want to actually live together. And through that living will be the engagement and the activism and the organizing and everything. We’re not just going to come to your six-hour meeting and agenda, we want to be able to eat, socialize, we want to be able to dance. It’s such a clear difference between the organizing I do with the more militant white activists versus the kind of community building initiatives we’re doing with racialized folks. I wish we could find ways to bridge them, but it’s so hard.
Sandy: Yeah… I kind of gave up with the subcultural radical left many years ago. A lot of my friends are still organized and radical left, but they’re not into these subcultural things. A few days ago, there was a demonstration going through my neighbourhood, and I was cooking with my partner in the kitchen when we heard this noise. There were people walking down the street around our building shooting off fireworks. And it’s just like, you know, we’ve been organizing in this neighbourhood for 8 or 9 years and they’re just marching through it. Everybody in this neighbourhood is going to be really annoyed. They claim to be a rebellious neighbourhood group, but they don’t know shit about the neighbourhood.
But the question of course is, how to relate… you know there’s a lot of social work in the communities which is actually not empowering. I don’t have answers on this, I only know that with our initiative, our association, and my studio, we have this idea of empowerment, because we’re coming from the Right to the City struggle and saw how the subaltern, the marginalised raised their voices and through the context of protest, became subjects, participating in society as political subjects, which was probably new for a lot of them. But a lot of the funding and programs in the community are actually just social work, which keep people somehow stuck in their marginalised position. I think if you want to really come together, it’s important to put aside the perspective of radical change coming by tomorrow. And for a lot of people it’s really about basic citizen rights like access to housing and education –– basic rights that are the foundation of everything else.
Kevin: I want to take a step back and connect all we’re talking about to a kind of counter-narrative of design, and ask about your relationship with Alex Jordan, and the whole Grapus legacy and what that was like?
Sandy: I moved to Berlin in 1990 from San Francisco and became a squatter in East Berlin, and for the first 4 or 5 years I was just doing activism. Then I finally decided to study graphic design, so I went to Weissensee, which is the East Berlin art and design school. They had a program where you could join the classes without being enrolled. By accident I came into Alex’s class, I didn’t know who he was at this point, not at all. It was an illustration class or a poster design class, and the theme he gave us was “Alexanderplatz”, one of the principal places in East Berlin. All these other students who were already enrolled were kind of like, a little bit arrogant towards me. I mean, I looked like a punk rock guy in the first place, but I felt quite insecure… So Alex came into the room and said: “The theme is Alexanderplatz. I’ll be back in 2 hours and when I come back, I want to see posters on the wall. You can only use a pen, and here’s the paper, A3 format. Go!”
All the students took out their pens and started these really sophisticated drawings, and I was just like fuck “fuck fuck fuck fuck”. So I made two posters. One was this kind of cartoon where this guy stands and raises his finger–in German if you talk to a dog and say “platz!”, it means “down!”. So I was making a joke that the dog was named Alexander. And of course, one of my names is also Alexander…
The second poster I drew was a self-portrait of me on the table and on the table there’s also a glass of wine, which is actually tilting and about to fall. And the legs transformed into the tower of Alexanderplatz, and the tower had a big mouth with teeth that were hanging over my head.
Alex came back and we all hung the stuff on the wall. They were all super sophisticated, but all they did was illustrations. They just made nice typography, beautiful drawings, so they basically made nice tourist posters. Mine was one of the very few that was actually going a little bit further, and he highlighted that and he kind of gave a super good critique on this.
Then I dug a little bit into who he was, and applied to the school, and then studied under him. This is where, well I wouldn’t say we became friends at this time, I was much younger… but he was visiting my squat, coming to demonstrations that I organized, and I was doing a lot of political posters at the time, so I’d bring my posters to university, and he would give me critique, and I would later print them and put them up on the streets.
Kevin: So he was a kind of mentor?
Sandy: Yeah. In 2000, I also got a grant in Southern Germany where Alex visited me, and we were getting drunk and having good talks about university and politics. I remember him saying that his job is to fuck people up for the market and open them up for society. I liked this notion very much: we want to work FOR society and not for some kind of market setting. And I still strongly believe it’s important to make this distinction between market and society when teaching.
Later that year, I curated this exhibition with some friends on engagement and graphic design. I went to France with some activist and designer friends, and Alex helped make connections in France for us. He opened doors so we got to know a lot of the post-Grapus groups; Nous travaillons ensemble, Ne pas plier. This was a big influence, as was how he was teaching, and how engaged he was towards any student. In my last year of study, I barely went to university, but we were communicating with fax machines, and yeah, we got quite close.
Later of course I had this phase of killing idols, so I had some critiques on his practice and his legacy. But the things he said when I got to know him like, “I was young and I had to escape Germany, I was having some trouble with the police. I was going to France and I had a decision: either I take up a weapon and fight, or I take up graphic design and fight. I decided to go for the graphic design…” I was a militant at this time you know! And there was this Grapus info flyer, like a poster, where they showed all their studio tables and they were full of fucking collage and marks on the wall and red stars and Vietnam. There was a big Kalashnikov with knots all over it. So I was super attracted to it, of course. He had all these fantastic stories to tell about Grapus. And he basically said, well there is a marginal design tradition which is collective and political. And he invited me to Chaumont to have an exhibition on autonomous posters, he made quite a few things possible for me.
Kevin: Do you think that there is a certain history that you are following, a certain legacy from Grapus? And how would we define this kind of work, can we draw a line between it and other design studios? Does the line even matter? But I do feel like, if for example we were trying to teach a course on this type of work, how would we do that in this day and age?
Sandy: It’s a difficult question. First of all, I don’t think that there is actually — I had this idea once that there was a marginal progressive international scene, which believes in certain values in the field of Graphic and Communication Design. But actually, it’s a bunch of individuals who’ve had the luck to meet at certain times and come together on the basis of “productive misunderstandings”, to overcome all these differences because we all live in different countries, we all have different educations. Even with Tony [Credland], who I got together with quite early on, I believe we actually have quite a different practice.
So, that’s pretty sad. There’s no global narrative or family of designers that are bound together. There’s certain values, and maybe for us and a few others there’s a relationship to activism and social movements, but that’s also something else because our identity as designers was always broader than just design. It was always battle, struggles, fights… you know? So there are people who actually are committed to radical change and social movements, who make themselves, in terms of their identity and how they understand themselves in society, dependent on these struggles. Whereas others are maybe mainly designers with their profession and maybe also have good values, progressive values and maybe –– to be a bit ironic, they donate once in a while.
So if I were to draw a line, this would be the first shot in trying. The funny thing is, you meet these kinds of people in every profession. There are people who work in academia and they’re like super identified with this whole field of the university and how discourses are organized there, and there’s also people who actually want to contribute to significant change. I usually connect with people who think like this, so that’s why it’s difficult to find these designers and draw a historical line. One of the things I’ve always disliked was the understanding of political design as just political posters and stuff like that. That’s kind of super narrow, it’s not really about political posters, it’s about a certain understanding of our practice and how what we do is connected to others.
There are also a lot of designers that we don’t even think of as designers, who are actually contributing with their design work and with their practice, in a sense which I would like to see more. And there’s also a lot of practices where, I mean, I used to be a graphic designer, I’m definitely a communication designer, but I’m also a social designer by now, so there’s also a lot of professions closer to the art field. A few artists I know, they still define themselves as artists, but their practice is actually very comparable to things I’m doing. So I would love to see the global manifesto where some of us can unite and we don’t feel so lonely anymore, right?
Kevin: Yeah. It’s definitely partly about not feeling as lonely and separated, that’s something I come back to a lot. There’s an emotional toll working in these ways. I think it’s interesting that you put the line between practicing as a designer, having these discussions as designers, or just having concerns as a person, and expressing it through the skills that you have. Part of my impetus for this project is based on still thinking that for design itself, there’s a way of changing the practice, the discipline. From teaching, I can see that there’s such a desire from students to see models for the types of studios like yours or mine. But there are so few out there. But are there actually so few? Or just so few that I know of because as you said, there’s not actually a community of practice, but just individuals who happen to have met each other at a few key moments over the last twenty years. So, I don’t know, it’s a hard thing for me to point towards for students, to find actual interesting models.
Sandy: Well you know, just recently, a week ago or so, a young student from Britain contacted me for an internship at my studio, and she used a common search engine and came across your website. She was looking for politically engaged design practices. So… I mean, you’re a model, I would be a model, there’s at least a few. Better than nothing! Of course most students would like to do something more sensible, maybe even earn a little bit less money if they could make a living contributing to social change. But the market is fairly small. There’s the whole world of NGOs, maybe some cultural institutions, but the field is quite limited, so it’s really a question of the economy. It’s not easy — I mean you’ve been doing a lot of work for free right? So have I. Maybe that’s something to point out, there’s something really great about it. You can do a lot of things and have a practice without being a professional yet, and be connected with something larger… And do something which is not a political poster to explain a problem or make people think about the world in a different way, but a poster which is already part of a struggle. Which is a big difference. There might also be a lot of shitty posters which we’ve designed, but they were part of a concrete social battle… And this also points to the question of how we read and evaluate our visual messages and design work…
Kevin: I like to think of that as a kind of material history of those struggles in a way. To have that kind of record in physical form. This makes me think of all those little cards you used to make, I don’t know if you’re still making them. You would print them on the offcuts of other projects.
Sandy: I still have a lot of giveaways in my studio. I was just having somebody over who was a student, and I love to walk through my archive and just pick and collect different things, some books, and just give them as presents. The background of this is very simple, when I was visiting the collective studios in France, they were throwing a lot of material on me. I was coming out of every studio in Paris with a lot, big huge posters, all these little flyers, and they taught me how to print them. I’ve always liked two things about it. First of all it’s like, “look I have something to say, I made this, and I would like to share this with you!” Second, it’s always about patting yourself on the shoulder, being kind of in love with yourself and also giving a present at the same time. And I do find this is a very honest relationship to our work, because we’re not free from wanting to be loved and do creative things, and it’s totally fine to feel great about that. But at the same time, we are dependent on the other side, on the recipient. So these little cards were always about this negotiation between these poles. And I just love giving out stuff for free, I mean I produced two newspapers here, and most of the stuff I do, I can pass out for free.
Kevin: But what about those little cards?
Sandy: I don’t make those little cards anymore, no. But like postcard sets and stickers, and I have a lot of how do you say… those things you put underneath the beer, magnets for fridges and stuff. But I still actually have a lot of these cards from the French guys, I really got a lot of them.
Kevin: Oh cool, that’s great, amazing, it makes me want to make all these little things.
Sandy: Yeah, sometimes it’s about these little things…
