Wilhelm Sandberg’s experimenta typographica: domestic origins and post-war impact

Histories of warfare and insurrection have evolved constantly reflecting, in part, reactions to the shifting nature of war caused by factors including technological innovation, ideological motivation and institutional development. This session will explore personal visual responses to conflict, defined as the activities of armed groupings prepared to use lethal force to achieve political aims. It will consider the role played by visual culture in developing supplementary historical topoi that accompany, and may challenge, both popular and official accounts. We will explore personal visual responses to conflict produced in, or in relation to, the domestic sphere and everyday life, defined as visual representations of subjects played out in the social and political spheres.

Personal visual responses to conflict bear upon subject and identity formation. This session hopes to offer useful insights into the relationship between the historical constituted as narrative, on one hand, and the autobiographical as fantasy (rather than as fiction) on the other. This is not to say that the autobiographical provides greater insight into human experience than other modes of historical inquiry. Rather, this session will hold that autobiographical responses to conflict comprise just one productive source that provides access to the dynamic between the experience of ordinary people and subsequent wider accounts of the same event, in relation to which the personal may emerge as either complementary or subversive. Either way, the dynamic destabilises any tendency to accede unreflexively to dominant accounts of past conflicts. The session will explore the role personal responses to conflict play in the mediation of history and ideology, private and public narrations of history, and individual and collective identities.

Histories of warfare and insurrection have evolved constantly reflecting, in part, reactions to the shifting nature of war caused by factors including technological innovation, ideological motivation and institutional development. This session will explore personal visual responses to conflict, defined as the activities of armed groupings prepared to use lethal force to achieve political aims. It will consider the role played by visual culture in developing supplementary historical topoi that accompany, and may challenge, both popular and official accounts. We will explore personal visual responses to conflict produced in, or in relation to, the domestic sphere and everyday life, defined as visual representations of subjects played out in the social and political spheres.

Personal visual responses to conflict bear upon subject and identity formation. This session hopes to offer useful insights into the relationship between the historical constituted as narrative, on one hand, and the autobiographical as fantasy (rather than as fiction) on the other. This is not to say that the autobiographical provides greater insight into human experience than other modes of historical inquiry. Rather, this session will hold that autobiographical responses to conflict comprise just one productive source that provides access to the dynamic between the experience of ordinary people and subsequent wider accounts of the same event, in relation to which the personal may emerge as either complementary or subversive. Either way, the dynamic destabilises any tendency to accede unreflexively to dominant accounts of past conflicts. The session will explore the role personal responses to conflict play in the mediation of history and ideology, private and public narrations of history, and individual and collective identities.

• Organisation