Brooms in the Balance

It’sDutch Design Week, and the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show has taken over the old KPN telecom building in Eindhoven; otherwise now in use as a creative hub and co-working space. In the middle of a large warehouse-type space on the first floor are three broomsticks, suspended in mid-air, as if in flight. Their wooden handles are skeletal, evoking a spine or an ancient weapon; their heads, in some cases, reptilian; their bristles, hair-like. The project’s title? Tenderlymilitant.exe: A Weapon Armoury for the Queer-Feminist Counter Apocalypse.

This collection of ‘broom armoury’ reimagines the broomstick as a tool for both care and resistance, and sits within a wider exploration of a ‘soft militancy to counter the emotional impact of the patriarchy’. I ask BA graduate and the project’s designer Anna Zoe Hamm to elaborate on what this means and why it was something they were keen to explore. ‘The conversation tends to be around physical or financial impacts of the patriarchy, which are very real, but what I experience most is the emotional impact—micro-aggressions that I don’t have the tools to defend myself from,’ she says. ‘It can be dangerous to speak up in those situations, and the advice I’ve been given by feminist theory, such as “say no”, feels masculine, confrontational and extroverted—I don’t recognise myself in that.’ (Anna Zoe uses she/they/he pronouns, but reserves ‘he’ for friends, so I am using she/they here.)

Anna Zoe looked to the plant kingdom for inspiration—organisms that, while often viewed as passive, have evolved myriad protective boundaries against stronger predators. Her approach is research-driven and led to a deep dive into the Natural History Museum’s herbarium and the Botanical Gardens in Vienna to explore the ‘militant potential’ of botanical defence mechanisms and their ‘supportive and strategic’ possibilities. ‘I am more interested in agency than freedom,’ she says. ‘And it doesn’t need to be power over anyone. I just need to feel it in myself.’

Through their research, they discovered that plants’ defence mechanisms can be categorised as ‘constitutive’ (always present) and ‘induced’ (activated in a moment of threat). ‘As I developed the project, the most common feedback was that I should make armour or a shield,’ they say. ‘But what I found really beautiful was that a lot of plants’ constitutive methods don’t rely on a hard shell. Plants can maintain a fragile frame and a soft body, and still protect themselves.’ She speaks about the ‘cargo of care’, and how plants ‘teach’ other creatures how to approach them: spikes that encourage slow, gentle handling, or thorn densities that invite some birds in, while keeping others out. The idea of reclaiming softer, feminine and traditionally domestic traits as powerful seems to resonate particularly with older women, who were often taught that to be a feminist meant becoming more masculine. ‘I was explaining the project to one woman and her eyes started glowing; she got teary and took both of my hands in hers,’ they say. ‘I think she was moved by the idea that her softness could be a strength.’

Anna Zoe’s botanical inspirations might not be the most obvious starting point, but you can’t see floating broomsticks and not think of witches—and she also undertook extensive research into the witch trials, which took place across Europe and colonial America from the 14th century to the late 18th century. She found that a broom left outside a house at a particular angle could be taken as evidence of a ‘witch’ inside, as could walking in the forest, and that bundles of fresh or dried flowers and herbs, for example, lavender, rosemary, mint, thyme, oregano or sage, tied to a stick were once known as witches’ brooms. ‘There is so much autonomy in being able to make your own medicines and care for your community in this way,’ she says. That female, often working-class, autonomy and wisdom is partly what the witch trials sought to extinguish. Mona Chollet quotes Matilda Joslyn Gage in her book, In Defence of Witches: ‘When for “witches” we read “women”, we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.’

Across cultures, it is considered unlucky to take a broom with you when you move house. ‘They’re really tied to the home and, therefore, so are the women who use them,’ explains Anna Zoe. ‘But this docile and domestic tool is becoming a symbol of resistance and subversion as women start taking them to protests as placards.’ Members of the Alliance of Indonesian Women used brooms in protests against police brutality and government corruption earlier this year, and Gen Z demonstrators traded traditional placards for brooms in anti-corruption protests in Nepal. As well as being readily available and the right shape, they act as a metaphor for ‘cleaning up the system’, while symbolising everyday power and peaceful intent. And Anna Zoe is keen to differentiate peace from passivity. ‘Many people don’t understand that to have peace, we need strong, caring structures that stand up for people—peace doesn’t come from submission.’

She is interested in how a broom changes the way the body moves—whether sweeping a floor, holding up a protest sign or defending a home from an intruder. ‘The broomstick morphs into whatever you need it to be in the moment,’ they say. ‘I can use it to enforce my personal space, to raise my voice; it can become an extension of my limbs and change my centre of gravity. That’s how I became interested in martial arts and the idea of soft militancy—grassroots movements or strategies designed to resist oppressive systems and governments. The broom is a makeshift weapon that every household has access to. It’s very democratic.’ As part of their graduate show, they ‘activated’ the brooms through movement that was part choreographed and part spontaneous, responding to what the broom seemed to invite.

When it came to making the brooms, Anna Zoe drew on both traditional broom-making techniques and weapon design in computer games. ‘In [Nintendo game, The Legend of] Zelda, one of the basic tools you can find is a broom,’ she explains. ‘It’s my favourite weapon. Even though it doesn’t really hold up against monsters, it’s fun to use. In other games, I saw bulky masculine characters posing with elaborate flaming brooms as if they were weapons, and that opened up ideas of what a broom could look like. It gave me the idea that it could have both offensive and defensive energy, and widened the different types of people I could welcome into this project.’

To render those virtual references in the real world, she turned to heritage broom-making practices from Japan, Poland and the United States, locking herself in the Design Academy workshops with YouTube tutorial after YouTube tutorial until she had chosen and perfected her techniques. ‘I started looking at American Shaker brooms, which are the most well-documented, and discovered different wrapping techniques. The ones I was most drawn to, for their intricate beauty, were the Hawk Tail and Turkey Wing bindings. I was fascinated to learn that, through tension alone, you can lock the bristles in.’ She discovered that brooms have evolved in relation to the materials available and the surfaces they are designed to sweep, sometimes even varying by season. Whereas American Shaker brooms have stiff straw bristles, in hotter, dustier climates, grass and hair are more commonly used, with longer, more fanned-out bristles—an idea she exaggerated in one of her brooms, which plays with the notion of hair growing from the broom’s ‘head’. She even explored Japanese and Polish hairbrush-making techniques, in which bristles are pushed through a series of holes and sewn or glued into place. Her handles are either hand-carved from industrial beams or, in one case, made from a branch she found in the woods, already engraved by bark beetles.

Anna Zoe graduated cum laude, won the 2025 Melkweg Award, with judges praising her ‘deliberate and critical entry point into broader political, cultural and material questions,’ and has since seen this project acquired by the Van Abbemuseum, on the recommendation of trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort, where it is currently on display. It is a striking testament to how an everyday object, long gendered, domesticated and therefore underestimated, can be reimagined as a tool of agency, care and resistance. In Anna Zoe’s hands, the broom becomes not only a household implement, but a provocation: an invitation to consider what soft power might look like when wielded with intention.