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2026

Full version of a text from Feral Magazine n°4, on the collective creation of Coats of Arms

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Negotiations on ‘Belonging’
with Coats of Arms

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Full version of Negotiations on ‘Belonging’ with Coats of Arms, Doriane Timmermans (OSP), June 2026.

At Feral 2025, three members of Open Source Publishing (Sarah Magnan, Doriane Timmermans and Vinciane Dahéron) led the workshop D’argent, à la traverse dentée de sable, a hands-on workshop on designing and creating coats of arms on fabric.

Using a database of medieval coats of arms from Belgian municipalities and a database of emojis, the various groups remixed and/or redrew these heraldic symbols to create new meanings. These coats of arms were drawn onto fabric using a pen plotter (a mechanical drawing tool that uses “standard” pens). Scans of several of them appear in Revue Feral No. 4.

In this article, Doriane revisits this practice of collectively creating coats of arms: a visual negotiation which, when attempting to create new commons, pits the need for belonging against the need for emancipation… and vice versa.

The first part of her text was published in Feral Magazine n°4, Feral Medieval (page 24). Here is the full text.

Doriane Timmermans practices as an artist, developer, designer, teacher and activist. She tries to question digital systems by looking at what they make us do, as much as what they do. Her political practice includes fighting against Big Tech and AI, and working on mutual support structures for precarious/trans people. She loves how we can collaboratively design through language, through declarative programming and socio-cultural practices. She believes in resilient gossip-networks, and situated and intimate tech pedagogy, as radical skills to help us empower each other.

OSP is a graphic design collective based in Brussels. They work on typography, websites, web-to print tools and plotters. They exclusively use free and open source software (F/LOSS). Through their projects they question software as cultural objects and modes of collaboration between graphic designers, artists, cultural institutions and schools. They question the influence and affordances of digital tools through the practice of (commissioned) graphic design, teaching and applied research.

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