- #WHAT DOES MAYDAY PARADE STAY MEAN HOW TO#
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- #WHAT DOES MAYDAY PARADE STAY MEAN SERIES#
We actually had quite a fight with the MayDay activists on this point. It doesn’t say much more than “I/we fight back,” even though it is a woman and is fighting with kitchen implements. The 3rd poster is basically a modernized version of the fighting worker. The second poster of the person standing on her office chair with the wrench is a call to change perspective.
#WHAT DOES MAYDAY PARADE STAY MEAN MANUAL#
The first poster looks at the relations between intellectual work and manual labor (table lamp vs broom,) between home office and public service and so on. We tried to produce images that raised these questions in a poetic way. The unions don’t have an answers to these new market/labor settings and logics.
#WHAT DOES MAYDAY PARADE STAY MEAN HOW TO#
So one question behind MayDay was, and still is, how to organize with others for our rights.
And when one is highly identified with one’s own work, self-determination and self-exploitation are often very close. We are talking about the penetration of the market and capitalist culture and so on into every sphere of life. So we try to find images which circulate between work and daily life, and to use images that are not stereotypes. But ideas of strikes and sabotage do not apply to self-employed, flexible freelance workers like us: “My laptop costs €1000! I can’t strike because I’m my own boss - and slave at the same time!” When the organizers approached us to design the posters, they had ideas like a freelancer pouring coffee into their laptop or a bike messenger who cuts his bike chain. But WTF?”īildwechsel: Like strikes or sabotage, old fashioned images and iconography of working class resistance (fists, flags, etc.) do not necessarily apply to the new precarity. In English: “Take back your life! Super-friendly, super-creative, super-flexible, super-assiduous. All of these posters have been conceptualized and produced in collaboration between the studio, friends, people of the MayDay groups… they are the results of long days (and sometime nights) of work, thousands of e-mails, discussions over beers, conflicts and the back-and-forth of process.” The things we do come out of wider discourses - we are not the geniuses. We are privileged with the part we do in this. Besides the collaboration, it is also always a social thing. I edited and condensed the notes here from interviews and email with the studio partners.īildwechsel was also careful to credit the role of invisible work in the conception, production, and distribution of the posters: “We productively depend on all the other people, friends, activists who make this happen - through this we become a part of the whole thing. But they are also participatory within an urban environment, not just inviting the viewer to remake the image of poster, but by extension the image of the city itself. The posters (and other related designs) are also participatory and collaborative - you place the stickers, you fill in the blank, you wear the mask, you rearrange the order. There is also a sense of humor and gentle absurdity to them. The studio’s MayDay posters address the contradictions of modern capitalism which can be found in the fields of work and everyday life.
Its clients include theaters, museums, activist groups, artists, curators, and other cultural and political institutions. To celebrate MayDay (and the anniversary of this blog) I asked the studio partners about their MayDay poster designs from the last 4 years.įounded in Berlin in 1999, bildwechsel is a political and socially engaged design studio dedicated to cultural, social and political graphic design and communications.
#WHAT DOES MAYDAY PARADE STAY MEAN SERIES#
Since 2007, the design studio bildwechsel / image-shift has joined them, producing a series of beautiful and provocative MayDay posters. Hundreds of activists and volunteers over the years have come together to organize the MayDay events. New forms of Precarity are a result of shifts in the modern workplace from permanent employment to temp work, freelance, and other instruments of “flexible labor.” This has resulted in an existence for workers without predictability or security, affecting both material and psychological welfare.
In 2006, it grew into EuroMayday, a day of protests and actions to fight “precarization” of workers and discrimination against migrants in Europe and beyond. The first MayDay Parade was held in Milan in 2001 and has since spread across Europe. Once a celebration of Spring and a commemoration of attacks on workers, EuroMayDay is a modern reinvention of the May Day tradition. In much of the globe, workers of the world celebrate the first of May with demonstrations, parades, and parties led by community groups, unions, and left wing political organizations. “What does International Workers’ Day mean for the self-employed - for the designer or any other highly flexible working person today? Or someone unemployed? How does someone self-employed go on strike? How do you fight for better working conditions?”
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