GIGA: Right Wing Codes Glossary and Workshops

On May 26th Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen died at the age of 89. Innovator of documentary, feminist, traveler, adventuress. In recent years she has been as active as ever and admirably. With major retrospective exhibitions in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019) and in FOMU Antwerp (2022), with the publication of her overview book Archive (2021) and the exhibition including the publication Gluckauf in Schunck, Heerlen (2023), the town of her birth.
The cover of Archive shows a self-portrait from 1981: a young Bertien with a wild haircut, tough attitude, challenging look, rolled-up sleeves, no bra, an SLR camera in front of her stomach: the personification of the militant woman of those years. She usually focused her camera on others, on ordinary people, on everyday life. She took her best-known photos in the 1990s on her countless trips to the former Soviet Union and later to China. All shot with simple 35mm point and shoot cameras. Not standing out as a photographer, capturing life as directly as possible. No longer in classic reportage black and white, but in colour. Her best work was in line with the photos she took as a young mother of her children and their friends during holidays: spontaneous, intimate with a natural sense of pose and form.
Her mid-career retrospective dates back to 1997 for the Institut Néerlandais in Paris and was curated by Paradox director Bas Vroege. The show included Hundred Summers, Hundred Winters. In 2001 we launched East Wind, West Wind with her at the Nederlands Foto Instituut in Rotterdam. Both shows travelled to multiple venues in Europe, Canada and the US.
Mid March she sent a heartbreaking video message from her sickbed to the Paradox authors gathered in the former Edam office, leaving us all in silence. So long Bertien, thank you for what you did and who you were, we miss you dearly.

In January 2021 the Moria collective launched a call to action to increase public awareness regarding the situation in the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos (GR). The camp had been designed to accommodate 3000 people yet housed up 20,000 at its peak during the summer of 2020.

Designers from around the globe were invited to create posters based on the photographs taken by refugees in the camps (the press had no longer access). The response was overwhelming: more than 400 graphic designers responded to the Love for Moria call for human rights. The posters were made available through the Now You See Me Moria website, encouraging people to download and print them, to hang in their windows, on balconies, at schools, universities, cultural institutions, and in the streets. They were also used in demonstrations in front of governmental and EU buildings in major European cities on Valentine’s day, February 14.

Later in 2021 Paradox joined forces with the collective and published Now You See Me Moria, the Action Book holding 449 posters by designers across the globe, all based on pictures taken by refugees in the Lesbos based camp. The content of the book was also made available in an unbound version, the Action Kit, which can be used as a ready-made exhibition.

The book and kit (designed by Raoul Gottschling and Christian Knöpfel) received major design awards. But more importantly: the publications and campaign resulted in more than 65 exhibitions in various types of venues, ranging from grassroots social-cultural centres to major art museums. Among them: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam which in 2024 decided to acquire two sets of the Action Book and Kit for its collection.

A selection of the work is now on display as part of the permanent collection of the Stedelijk in the exhibition Tomorrow is a Different Day (Collection 1980-Now). Open until mid 2025.