Stickers as self-authorised ‘publishing’ in urban spaces: The graphic language, themes, and localisations of stickers in the Ruhr area, Germany

Speaker: Irmi Wachendorff (University of Reading)

This research seminar is free & open to all.

Join us in person in the University of Reading’s Department of Typography, Room T4.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.

Irmi Wachendorff’s presentation will analyse a dataset of 5500 tagged and geo-referenced stickers in public space from the Signs of the Metropolis research project (Ziegler et al. 2022) which explored visual multilingualism in the Ruhr area in Germany. She will focus on typographic and semiotic visual analysis, discuss stickers in comparison to other signs in urban space, and examine the publicised themes.

Stickers are one of the smallest and yet – on looking closer – one of the most visually expressive and liberated forms of signs in urban space (Wachendorff 2021). Clustered on dedicated canvases such as lampposts, road signs and electricity boxes, they are placed by various stakeholders with different goals: supporters of political parties, protest movements, members of football clubs, music fans, sticker artists, and commercial actors. Stickering is an act of democratisation and place-making in which citizens as authors negotiate their social and cultural positions through visual signs in the urban environment (Vasileva 2021).

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Irmi Wachendorff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. She is a graphic designer and design historian with specialisations in typography and sociolinguistics. Her PhD focussed on ‘Typographic Landscapes – Letters in Cities as Social Artefacts’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen and was funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Irmi is passionate about design education, the practice, theory and history of graphic communication, typography and visual culture, lettering in urban space, the relationship of typography and language, and the bridge between graphic design and sociolinguistic disciplines.