Sem Algumas
Joana Garcês
Sem Algumas (“Without Some”) is a book investigating the invisibility of women’s work in Portuguese design — work that existed but was never signed, archived or cited. It starts from a simple question: why are these women not in history? It assumes this absence is not an accidental void but a condition built over decades by small and large decisions of exclusion.
The title carries two meanings: “sem” (without) as negation and deprivation — and, as a homophone of “cem” (a hundred), a vast quantity, what was never truly counted — and “algumas” (some), in the feminine plural, pointing to all the missing women.
Unlike academic studies of inequality in design, the project aims to make readers feel it, placing them inside the problem. Form and content therefore merge: Swift, a serif typeface that is nonetheless structured; white-on-white printing that deliberately hinders reading; unstable, translucent 90 g paper that never fully reveals the content, suggesting a partial, incomplete presence.
A sequence of 130 blank pages, unprinted and unnumbered, which readers pass through almost unconsciously, reproduces the mechanism of unperceived inequality. The number refers to the 130 years that still separate men and women from full equality.
Sem Algumas proposes an experience: trying to see what has been systematically made invisible, from the idea that what is not easily read tends not to be read, and what is not read tends to be forgotten.
Imprint / Technical Rider:
Year: 2026
Dimensions: 170 × 240 × 40 mm; 240 pages
Materials: Tracing paper 90 g.
Production and finishing: White printing; hand-bound with white thread.
Resources and credits: Swift, Gerard Unger, 1985, Linotype; Adobe InDesign CC 2026.
Curricular Unit:
Project (1st year)
Supervising Professor:
Eduardo Aires
Keywords: Invisibility, Memory, Women
See this project in the Material Archive interactive archive →