ISMAHANE POUSSIN






Ismahane Poussin is a multidisciplinary artist and/or designer based in Paris, France.  

Often working across multiple mediums simultaneously, both traditional and digital, she adopts an exploratory artistic approach fueled by perpetual curiosity. She believes in the intersections between different domains and in experimenting with new processes. Her primary graphic inquiries revolve around the boundaries of various mediums and how to create within self-imposed constraints and rules of the game. Through her work, she seeks to provoke personal reflection with a strong sense of meaningness, political, social & philosophical as an approach base.
A child of the internet, she was early fascinated by the naive and vibrant aesthetics of early computers.
These images from the dawn of the digital age never leave her and serve as her primary source of inspiration.  

She is also an art curator, part of Milieu Studio, a girl-runned  trio to make art collectivly efficient.


HELLO.ISMAHANE@GMAIL.COM
INSTAGRAM

CV 






Education
 2019_2021
MA Type design
École Estienne,Paris

2017_2019
BA Graphic Design 
École Duperré, Paris



Exhibitions + Features
 2025
Publication of my Wage Against the Machine project in the first Another Graphics publication.

2024
Publication of my Wage Against the Machine project in the Slanted magazine n°44.

2024
Exhibition of a collective art installation september 27- 29, Arches Citoyennes, Paris

2024
Exhibition of an artwork and curation of the collective exhibition Autopoïèse at Tour Orion on June 14-15, 2024.

2024
Exhibition of my project Wage Against the Machine at the Zero1 Festival in La Rochelle, from March 28-30, 2024.

2023
Mention in The Index newsletter [It’s Nice That] on November 23, 2023, about my latest typo-knitting research.

2022
Article in It’s Nice That magazine about my diploma project, Wage Against the Machine.

2021
Exhibition of the project Wage Against the Machine at Paris Design Week 2021.



Jobs 2023–TODAY
Freelance for various clients such as Cure Skatemagazine, avril paris, Lueur, Canal+, Festival Zero1, Dockyard, HKW Berlin, Archive Books, cultural collectives, Rex Club, musicians, etc.

NOVEMBER 2022–TODAY
Multidisciplinary graphic designer at 
Petite Friture, Montreuil.

APRIL 2022–JULY 2022
Graphic designer and typographer at Studio B2302, Berlin, Germany.

FEBRUARY 2022–APRIL 2022
Graphic designer at Green Fabric [sustainable textile fablab], Brussels, Belgium.

OCTOBER 2021–JANUARY 2022
Junior graphic designer at Studio Malte Martin, Paris.



What I can do for you 
Posters, books, magazines, illustration, visual systems, branding, visual identities, flyers, animations, knitted posted and scarves and many more

All Adobe suite, knitting machine, figma, a little bit of blender, processing, some CSS






KNITTING SELECTED WORKS







Wage against the machine
 Wage Against the Machine is a research project I started in 2021 as part of my master degree in typographic design at the École Estienne, which I continue to develop today as a typographic and artistic research practice. When I started my project, my desire was to repurpose fashion tools, particularly knitting, to create a space for typographic questioning and protest. 

I started with a manual knitting machine from the 1970s, which I learned to use and in front of which I thought about a new protocol for creating letters adapted to technical constraints, but also to the duality between the aesthetics of a message and its meaning. 

The knitted texts are then reused to create organic formal vocabularies that can be reused indefinitely for other media (digital, print, etc.). Today I work with a Brother KH910, a knitting machine hacked using an Arduino system, which is connected to a computer via open source software called Ayab. This new machine allows me to focus more on formal research and experimentation from a graphic designer’s perspective. 





Publishing practices
 During the Dakar biennale « The wake, l’éveil, le sillage, xàll wi », we enhanced a project with Archive for Publishing Practices.
For this project, we thought a process that allowed us to translate voices into patterns that can be knitted. We wrote a Processing program that generates shapes variating regarding intensity of voice, speed of speech, volume of speaking. By speaking with the microphone of the computer, the program created an abstract pattern in real time, translating any voice of any language into graphics, gathering everyone’s speech in a new abstract language. Those patterns are then saved in JPEG, scaled for the knitting machine and knitted.





OPEN TO WORK