Design Drafts #3: Selected writersDesign Drafts #3: Selected writers

Tala Abdalhadi is a Palestinian interdisciplinary creative, art director and storyteller. She holds a BA in General Design from Birzeit University and has completed a year of Interactive Media Design at The Royal Academy of Arts in The Netherlands. Often, you’ll find her playing basketball while exchanging perspectives wherever she goes. Tala's work reflects on social justice, culture, and collective action through various mediums and experimentations. Her latest project features kinetic fashion that explores freedom through movement in the experimental film Producing What We’ve Never Witnessed, Without Reproducing What We’ve Ever Only Lived (How to produce freedom from non-freedom?), aiming to mobilise for a new reality.

Tala’s proposal for Design Drafts builds on these aforementioned questions by focusing on the spatial dimensional practice of movement in the contexts of liberation and oppression. For example, the body within protests, locally symbolised in Palestine by bodies throwing stones. In the proposal she highlights the interlinking and movements of bodies as a communicator beyond any language barrier or shapeshifting; especially within the context of life under occupation in Palestine where Israelis disguise themselves as protesters and assimilate to attack from inside, the subtleness of their spatial expressions revealing their mismatch in a crowd of protesters.

Myriam Amri is an anthropologist, writer, and visual artist. She is completing her PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University where her research follows money to examine colonial and capitalist regimes in North Africa. As a visual artist and filmmaker, her creative practice explores the intimacy of quotidian life in spaces of margins and moments of crises using moving images, film photography, installations, and sound. Her creative writings have appeared in Kohl Journal, Sekka Mag, and Rusted Radishes. She’s the co-founder of the Arab experimental literary collective Asameena.

Myriam’s proposal for Design Drafts highlights how low-resolution videos from the 2011 protests in the Arab region onwards make transnational communities of protests and protestors through their form and circulation. Through a collection of such videos, she considers the radical possibilities of the low-resolution format, of grainy media with a shaky frame and uneven angles, as it constitutes a shared repertoire of revolutionary possibilities in the Arab region.

Shruti Hussain (she/her) is an architect, journalist and researcher based in India. She has a penchant for historical narratives that shape modern politics and geographies and resulting cultures of built spaces, media and heritage. She has explored her interests by doing fellowships with Wikipedia Open Knowledge, Canadian Centre for Architecture; Research Projects - Archiving and Digitization of Materiality of Indian Cinema & EU funded CHIEF Project, through journalism for Failed Architecture; BBC South Asia; Sakal Times, and through editorship with CQRA Podcasts and Blogs & Quality Edge magazine. She relishes listening to people from various walks of life, world cinema and reading nonfiction and travel.

Shruti’s proposal for Design Drafts is envisaged as a multimodal collection of visuals, interviews and analysis to explore the language of the Shaheen Baugh Protest in Kondhwa (2019-2020) in its imagery, protest art, slogans, clothing and its urban setting by revisiting her onsite research. The organised protest disbanded, but even now the bustling everydayness of Kondhwa fights to be seen and acknowledged in the homogenous urbanity of Pune, India.

Candice Jansen is a memorist. She practices as a photographer, writer, editor, curator, scholar, archivist, and educator on photography. Currently she is a New Archival Visions, Digital Curatorial Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and a 2024 Research Fellow with Women Photographers International Archive.

In her application for Design Drafts, Candice proposes a visual essay of photographic illustrations and accompanying texts curated from the Grassroots collection, held at the University of the Western Cape Robben Island Mayibuye Archives in South Africa. Mayibuye as the archive is known, is one of the largest archives of the anti-apartheid struggle in the world.

Alice Wan is a Netherlands-based designer and researcher from Hong Kong. She graduated with an MA in Information Design from Design Academy Eindhoven and a BA in Communication Design from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research-driven design practice focuses on investigating visual languages. Previous experiences in graphic and multidisciplinary design studios have shaped her approach to data visualisation and design narrative. Reflecting on the social and political movements in Hong Kong in 2019, the physical and temporal distance has provided her with a fresh perspective on information design, allowing her to envision a niche that aligns with her creative ambitions.

Alice's application for Design Drafts proposes a visual archive of gestures used by Hong Kong protesters in 2019-2020, exploring how hand signals quickly became a core civil disobedience tactic in political struggles, thus demonstrating an alternative form of communication beyond words.