stanza – Grace Roy Hess, Marie Højlund,Line-Gry Hørup, Freja Kir, Laura Silke

stanza is a programme & studio for critical graphic design & publishing. Founded in 2022, stanza is run by Line-Gry Hørup, Marie Højlund, Laura Silke, Freja Kir and Grace Roy Hess. Based in Copenhagen, each of its members have academic backgrounds and careers which extend outwards, internationally.

Aiming to expand the ways in which graphic design and publishing can be experienced outside traditional institutional contexts, stanza operates at the intersections of exhibition-making, publishing, and archival practices. This includes the publication of books—notably artist books—and other printed matter, graphic design identities, talks, symposiums, exhibitions, happenings, and other related activities.

To nurture access and carefully curated selections of printed matter, stanza is also in the process of building a collection of books and printed matter which will be accessible to the public. These books reflect an idiosyncratic approach to graphic design and the personal principles that guide stanza and our collaborators’ work. The selected books—chosen for qualities such as title, colour, materiality, weight, humour, excess or modesty—represent tangible influences.

Our practice is characterized by an interdisciplinary working method, where through a graphic design approach, we participate and explore with different forms of publishing, distributing, researching, visual editing, and analog printing. In a Scandinavian context characterized by modernist uniformity, we work purposefully for a more distinctive and specifically produced approach. We consider the book (in its broadest sense) to be a central, but often overlooked, actor across design and artistic traditions, even more so in a time characterized by extensive technological upheaval.

Of gathering and to gather – otherwise

We all know the stories of cave paintings — beautiful and mysterious, they have served as acts of storytelling for centuries. The necessity for gathering information, for sharing, for creating channels of knowledge, and for building communal spaces to explore these very processes has been with us since the invention of fire and the definition of space.
With critical consideration and curiosity, stanza turns to graphic design as the primary lens for approaching communication, creation, publishing, and knowledge sharing — understanding them as inherently ever-changing.
Across this talk, we move between three interwoven threads: considering ourselves within a tech-influenced present; the acts of gathering and narrating through archives; and the quieter, often invisible labour of care and production that underlies design itself.
With these reflections, we ask how critical graphic design might open space for soft counteracts and other forms of narration.