”Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us alone with the Danes": Immigration and National Identity in Superflex

Danish art and design collective Superflex has been internationally leading in addressing issues related to
the global refugee crisis as well as immigration and national identity. The poster campaign, Foreigners,
Please Don’t Leave Us Alone with the Danes (2002) set a national agenda as a reaction towards the
inflammatory anti‐immigrant political discourse that emerged in Denmark after 2001 when a new liberalconservative
coalition formed government by the parliamentary support of the nationalist‐conservative
Danish People’s Party. The poster campaign made an immediate impact on the political debate at the time
and has become emblematic as a general reaction to anti‐immigrant political discourse in Denmark; a
discourse that became heated during the so‐called Caricature Crisis in 2006 and after the 2015 Copenhagen
Shootings at a political meeting and by the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen.
This paper present an analysis of the poster with special reference to Superflex’ general avant‐garde profile
as designer‐artists and the reception of the poster during the original launch in 2002. The analysis will focus
on the poster’s linguistic, rhetorical, and aesthetic aspects and will discuss its findings by including other
works by Superflex that address national identity and immigration, e.g., Superdanish (2004), Minority
Report (2004), and Rebranding Denmark (2007).