Emma Dwyer

Collaborators: On power, complicity, and design

Through Risograph-printed posters and an accompanying publication, Collaborators examines the intersection of graphic design with power, violence, and control. Designers often work within larger systems; this project questions whether it’s possible to remain ungovernable within such totalizing systems as capitalism and state power. Collaborators presents examples of the ways in which power and meaning are produced and explores the designer’s complicity in upholding and constituting these systems, while striving for—and perhaps failing to find—a way out. The work seeks to provoke its viewer into examining their own role as collaborator in various structures of power and consider the liberatory potential of refusal.