Designers imagine the impact of Brexit, 10 years on

The video begins with a faceless performer wearing a mask of former British prime minister David Cameron. Standing in front of a crinkled white sheet, the performer begins to slowly feed pages of a book into a paper shredder, letting the machine’s whir serve as the video’s only sound. The process continues for five minutes, and the mask changes five times, from Cameron to Theresa May and Boris Johnson. By the end of the part-comical, part-unsettling performance, the book has been reduced to a pulp. This performance is part of an exhibition marking the 10-year anniversary of Brexit, which was made official on June 23, 2016. Titled The Other Side: Ten Years after the Referendum, the exhibition was curated by the publisher GraphicDesign& and is currently on view at Pentagram’s Osh Gallery in London through June 26. The exhibition incorporates work from 10 different artists across a range of media, including typography, weaving, garment-making, and embroidery. Together, they tell the story of a creative community that, a decade later, is still mourning Brexit’s impact. How the dust is settling for the design community post-Brexit While each artist selected for the exhibition comes from a different background, they were all given the same materials to work with: just 10 copies of GraphicDesign&’s book The Other Side: An Emotional Map of Brexit Britain. The book, which was published in 2019, spotlighted the voices of 26 Leave and 24 Remain voters from throughout the UK. According to Lucienne Roberts, the cofounder of GraphicDesign&, the process of writing the book was a “heartbreaking” look at the miscommunication between British voting blocs. In one interview with a communications expert named Ian Leslie, she recalls, Leslie aptly compared Brexit to the breakup of a marriage. [Photo: LucienneRoberts+; GraphicDesign&] At the time, it was unclear exactly how Brexit might impact the creative community, though many practitioners feared that design education could suffer and