seafaring women

Seafaring women is a print object referencing a double broadsheet newspaper that includes stories transcribed from late 19th and early 20th century news archives describing the surprisingly large numbers of women found aboard battleships, submarines and passenger ships as sailor and stowaways. These were especially popular in British and American newspapers of the 1920s, alongside images and advertisements featuring gender-norm challenging “flappers”. Design elements include gender-remixed lithographs of pirates, courtesans, and sailors, remixed signal flags, and a collage of images of ships at sea known to contain these female sailors and stowaways. 

About the institute for Inverted Histories

The institute for Inverted histories (also known as iIh) works at the intersections of art, design, politics, media, and cultural studies to produce objects and experiences that acknowledge and revel in mysteries among the material traces of history. Through humor, subversion, parafiction, gender-bending, and media archeology, iIh collects and reconfigures pieces of the historical media landscape. Projects and publications highlight contradictory traces left by deceptively familiar stories, making them unfamiliar through subversion, juxtaposition, or voracious collecting in the face of an artificially normalized curation of the past. The absurdity of the authority of a single voice or narrative is amplified, along with the necessity of fiction, skepticism and play in the landscape of history. The institute for Inverted histories was established in 2015 and is a collaboration between Rebecca Sittler and Anastasiia Raina.