Faire is a bi-monthly publication dedicated to graphic design. Produced by Empire, the publishing arm of French design studio Syndicat (designers Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer), Faire is aimed at students as well as researchers and professional designers. Each issue addresses a specific object or theme and is written by a renowned author.

This anthology set, volume 11,  includes three issues, numbers 39 through 41:

n°39 — A series of cards and performances: My Calling (Card) #1 #2 #3 by Adrian Piper. By Jérôme Dupeyrat

My Calling (Card) #1 #2 #3 (1986-1990; 2012), by Adrian Piper (born in 1948), is a series of prints in the form of calling cards and performances designed by the artist as a tool to confront her counterparts with their sexist and racist actions within different relational and social contexts: a dinner, a party, a bar…

Similar to other conceptual, performative, relational and textual art works by Adrian Piper that expose dissent and even conflict in order to move past them, the “calling cards” are part of the Piper's approach to identity. Her works confront the responsibility of those who, in the face of this identity, consciously or unconsciously reproduce the mechanisms of discrimination and oppression.

20 pages

n°40 — A Collaboration : Les Urbaines & Eurostandard. By Manon Bruet

Since opening in 1996, the interdisciplinary festival in Lausanne, Les Urbaines, has collaborated with numerous Swiss graphic designers. Following Guillaume Chuard and Renato Zülli (2011), Maximage (2012–2015), and Daniel Hättenschwiller and Thomas Petit (2016) among others, Eurostandard took charge of the visual identity of the three editions from 2017 to 2019.

To constitute this triptych, which had been imagined as a whole, for each event the studio proposed to explore a new technique originally intended to produce deformed selfies. On one hand the use of this procedure allowed them to question modes of self-representation and thus produce a discourse profoundly rooted in its time. On the other, it allowed them to generate unique visuals and to inscribe absolutely their identity in three steps, each one following on from the previous one.

This issue provides the opportunity to look back, through the words of the graphic designers as well as their client, at these three years of collaboration, and more broadly, at the festival’s different visual identities which, when taken together, seem to describe a certain landscape of Swiss graphic design.

24 pages

n°41 — The Image of Fashion: Forget (fashion) photography? By Aude Fellay

Fashion photography has to fight for our attention. Memes, selfies, stories, reels: the competition is fierce—and happening at a time when it seems increasingly difficult to speak of photography at all. Should we grapple with photography anew from the perspective of its afterlife, as some have argued in the field of photographic theory? What would it mean to “forget” fashion photography? By drawing on recent debates about the condition of photography, this essay examines images of fashion and a number of contemporary phenomena that speak to the need to think of the fashion image anew.

20 pages

Published by Editions Empire, 2022
Bilingual, in French and English

64 pages total, each issue separately bound, b&w and color images, 8.25 × 11.75 inches

ISBN: 979-10-95991-41-0