Truth and materiality

The Truth Wall is Kiss & Bite founder Alan Qualtrough’s participatory art project, which invites people to print and display their own politically-driven letterpress poster.

It’s inspired by Alan’s interest in protest posters, especially the I AM A MAN campaign used in the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s to make a statement about race equality, and the Atelier Populaire campaign in Paris, also in the 1960s, which was a student challenge to the French right-wing government. In both instances, traditional printing methods were hacked to give ordinary people a voice and the ability to print at home.

The first version of the Truth Wall appeared in Plymouth city centre (above) as a parody of newspaper bills that used to stand outside newsagents and was driven by a concern with language, truth, materiality, embodiment and ways to give people excluded from the media a voice.

The second version (above right) was a collaboration with Nudge Community Builders and the Stonehouse community and used cloth flags (as well as paper) as a printing material to reference domestic curtains and add movement to the installation.

There were then several mini-versions that were collaborations with students and a third large-scale version at Print In Action 2022 that involved the creation of a bespoke Protest Font (please see our project page) to enable more people to participate and the posters to be larger (image below).

The Truth Wall has also inspired students, who have had placements in the Kiss & Bite studio, to create similar projects driven by their own interests.

Poster slogans can be simple, loud and challenging or more subtle and ambiguous and the creation of the Truth Wall concept was inspired by Roland Barthes 5 Narrative Codes: Hermeneutic, Proairetic, Semantic, Symbolic and Cultural.