Laurens Kolks > spatial design

Cumulus Nantes 2025

3-7 June 2025

Event

Cumulus Nantes 2025

Paper presentation.

The Cumulus Nantes conference "challenged designers, academics and experts to tackle the value of Connectivity and Creativity in times of Conflict."

Responding to this call, I presented my paper Guerrilla Information Battles: Publishing in Public Spaces.

Publics are associations of people – both physical crowds and virtual communities – that are actively constructed and sustained through socio-material articulation. A salient example of such a public-sustaining articulation is the largely unauthorized activity of publishing in public spaces through ‘guerrilla tactics’ such as graffiti, posters, banners, and stickering. As the Cumulus 2025 theme track "Informational Issues" seeks to critically investigate public engagement with published information in its many shapes and forms, the role of urban environments as dynamic and informal political bulletin boards should not be ignored.

The working paper I presented draws on ongoing research into the built environment as an unofficial platform for political discourse. It draws on research into graffiti, posters, banners, and stickering as media to informally (and mostly illegally) publish political statements in public spaces, and comment on the political communications of others. Of these ‘guerrilla publications’ I have identified distinct types. I use the term aesthetics of vandalism to denote aesthetic experiences invoked by specific acts of mischief that target these unofficial publications.