G8 Hello posters

what: poster series
where: germany
when: 2007

“spring 2007; ahead of the g8 summit in germany. the g8 working group of the berlin-based group fels (für eine linke strömung) and the design studio image-shift (www.image-shift.net) have been meeting and discussing. the first material output of these meetings is the posters series hello flexibility, hello borders and hello gender. through the texts, the images and their interplay, we have sought to highlight the ambivalence of the themes addressed. their goal is to make a contribution (hopefully lasting beyond june 2007) to the making sense of the social reality for which the g8 – as an aspect of governance within empire – stands. the discussion is now opened, and we look forward to your response.”

hello flexibility: living – and making a living – nowadays demands unrelenting flexibility. we have to be able to do more, know more, and learn more. we have to move further, and at shorter notice. we’ve got used to having to walk into/out of jobs on demand (and sometimes as we please), and finding ways of making our ‘free’ time productive. decades ago, the routine of 9-to-5, five days a week, was rejected. and we wouldn’t want to go back. but is this really what we – or those who came before us – fought for? and where will the pressing needs and desires in the struggles of today and tomorrow take us?

hello borders: rolled out, seemingly arbitrarily. segregating. stratifying. governed and sometimes guarded. between and within territories. yet these borders are never entirely impermeable. there are always flight lines which take us through them and beyond – their realisation expressive of an irre-pressible desire. as deterritorialisation is enacted, everyone finds themselves constituent of a new social reality – a process which nobody can hold back.

hello gender: sex and gender roles are not as clear or static as they once seemed. but what if we tried to push things a little further? what if we were to more fully unlearn the gender and sex roles assigned to us? what if we were to stop saying “i am…” and started to say, “we want to become…”? and why is it so much easier to pose questions like these, than it is to enact them in our daily practice?

we have printed 2000 copies of each poster. we hope that they will be hung in people’s flats, in bars, in cinemas, schools, universities and bookshops, as well as in the streets. we are more than happy for them to be reprinted – including and especially in other languages and countries.