Operative autonomy

: Wild Plakken and political practice in 1980s Amsterdam

Abstract

This research project examines the political practice of the Dutch graphic design collective Wild Plakken (1977–1996). The founding members of Wild Plakken were united by the student movements of the mid-1970s and their desire to mobilise graphic design in service of political action. Between 1977 and its dissolution in1996, the collective designed posters, pamphlets, badges, and graphic identities for left-wing political parties and pressure groups. In its analysis of Wild Plakken’s engagement with political organisations, this thesis focuses exclusively on its designs for New Social Movements (NSMs). In doing so, this research coordinates the crucial visual and sociopolitical discourses — from the neo-avant-garde to the squatting movement — that shaped Wild Plakken’s practice and thus situates the collective within a dynamic plexus of social activism.
In order to ground this analysis historically, this project positions Wild Plakken’s collaborations with the NSMs within the temporal framework of the ‘Long 1980s’, conceptualised by the inter-disciplinary scholar Nick Aikens and others in The Long 1980s: Constellations of Art, Politics and Identities. This periodisation, which proposes to account for the two decades between 1975 and1995, was a moment of significant sociopolitical change within the Netherlands, during which questions of individual freedoms, public space, and political representation took on new urgency in the response to the various crises of the postwar order in the early 1970s. To account for the various networks of influence within which Wild Plakken worked, this project takes a post-structuralist approach that places the collective within the discursive struggles of the long 1980s, and argues for an interpretation of its practice as enmeshed within a historically contingent network of political meaning-making.
This thesis conceives of Wild Plakken’s practice as a model of operative autonomy, a framework through which the collective mobilised the aesthetic, ideological, and organisational forms of graphic design in service of the period’s politics of autonomy. As such, I propose that Wild Plakken’s practice can be read as an articulation of the political potentialities of the Left in 1980s Amsterdam.

Date of Award	Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Harriet Atkinson (Supervisor), Megha Rajguru (Supervisor), Alice Twemlow (Supervisor) & Jeremy Aynsley (Supervisor)