fanettemellier.com
@fanettemellier
Open to the public
Printed stuff
Fanette Mellier works in an artisanal way in her studio in Paris. She practices a radical and colorful graphic design. She will present in this conference her latest projects: visual identities for cultural structures, typographical plaids, and experimental books produced in parallel. Lots of printed stuff!
Specializing in print design, Fanette Mellier (1977) creates mainly atypical works in the cultural field. Besides commissioned work, through which she handles several themes, Mellier invests herself in experimental projects that freely shuffle fundamental aspects of graphic design: typography, color, printing process and relation to public spaces.
Her works have been displayed in numerous contemporary art museums and centres, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
Design for the Times
The New York Times Magazine is known for bringing together ambitious journalism, powerful visuals and daring typographic systems. Creative Director, Gail Bichler will discuss how her team approaches designing for the diverse range of content that the magazine publishes including designing for current events in real-time.
She will talk about the current role of the magazine within the larger context of the Times, give a behind the scenes look at how their conceptual covers are made, and share her thoughts on the role of experimentation in everything from the magazine’s special issues to their digital presence to some of their forays into other mediums like audio and print only sections of the paper.
Gail Bichler is the creative director of The New York Times Magazine where she leads the creative team responsible for the design and art direction of The Magazine and its supplements. She and her team have won numerous awards for their print and interactive design from organizations including the Art Directors Club, the Society of Publication Designers, D&AD, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, the Type Directors Club and Creative Review, among others. Gail has taught and lectured internationally. She is a member of AGI and a former board member of the SPD.
In the last session we will see a selection of books designed by Irma Boom, one of the most renowned graphic designers of the moment. We will be able to take a journey from her first designs in the 1980s to recent examples, taking as a guiding thread the third edition of the retrospective miniature catalogue that she herself periodically updates.
Irma Boom’s work is a tribute to the history and present day of the book, a celebration of its powerful presence as an object and a testimony to its survival in times of electronic publications.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.
Is it better than a Tree?
Design books in 2023
Jonathan Hares is a British designer living and working in Switzerland, having moving there after meeting his wife, Nicole Udry at the RCA, London. Since 2018, he is been working with Cornel Windlin at Lineto.com in Zurich. He continues designing books and exhibitions in his studio in Lausanne. He mostly works for a small circles of clients based on relationships that have lasted years. He is currently designing books for Isamu Noguchi for the White Cube gallery and the second edition of the Museum is not Enough for the CCA, Montreal. He teaches at the ECAL, Lausanne.
Lineto.com is Switzerlands first digital foundry, and started a trend for designer-created fonts, pulling together a generation of European designers who created type as a by-product of their working process. Jonathan is the designer of the current Lineto website with Jürg Lehni and Cornel Windlin. (Studio) Jonathan Hares is the loose name given to what whatever else happens in the remaining days of the week. Which is Mostly books, often working with Amaury Hamon and Jonas Marguet. Finally Jonathan Hares teaches on the Editorial course at the ECAL with Gilles Gavillet.
High on Type is a collective of five calligraphers, artists and/or designers. Writing is the basis for everything they do. Whether they are organising a festival, doing a residency, creating an exhibition or giving a lecture. In this lecture, which Ivo and Guido will be giving, they will show why it is so important to keep playing in a making process, using mainly two major recent projects.
Guido de Boer, born 1988 is an independent visual artist with a background as designer. His work consists of images that you can read and texts that you can expe- rience visually. His work is large, monumental and handmade and therefore expressive, but also co- mes across as graphic. In addition to his artistic practice, Guido is a teacher at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
Ivo Brouwer, born 1992 is a type and graphic artist based in The Hague. His work compiles of experimental type and graphic pat- terns made by translating tactile methods to digital environments and the other way around. He holds a Master‘s degree in Type Design from KABK Royal Academy of Arts The Hague. In 2022, he received a fund for Talent Development by the Creative Industries Fund NL.
Event at COA, Plaça Nova 5
Book your seat (soon)
In an article about people using AI image synthesis tools, WSJ compared their arrival to another major technological revolution in art – the adoption of photography in the 19th century (8/19/22). New Yorker magazine stated: “How we work — even think — changes when we can instantly command convincing images into existence.” (9/19/22) NYT wrote that “A.I.-based image generators like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have made it possible for anyone to create unique, hyper-realistic images just by typing a few words into a text box.” (10/21/22)
Are we indeed living through a major revolution in visual culture? Is it true that “anybody” can create “unique” images using this technology? In my talk I will critically evaluate some of the claims made about AI Image Synthesis, and suggest alternative ways of understanding it. The talk draws on the latest chapter in the book “Artificial Aesthetics: a Critical Guide to AI, Design and Media” (Manovich and Arielli, 2021-) being published online at manovich.net
Lev Manovich is a world-renown innovator and top influencer in many fields, including digital art, media theory, digital humanities, and cultural analytics. He is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. Manovich was included in the list of “25 People Shaping the Future of Design” and the list of “50 Most Interesting People Building the Future”. He is an author of 15 books that include The Language of New Media described as “the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.”
Only for MED students
In this session we will focus on the figure of Joost Grootens, a Dutch graphic designer specialising in the design of books on architecture, urban planning and art. His work is characterised by the handling of large amounts of information in the form of statistical data, maps and diagrams. His ability to visualise data has made him a benchmark in the field of visual communication.
Taking as a starting point a retrospective book of his own work entitled “I swear I use no art at all”, we can get to know his design philosophy and some notable examples of his editorial production.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.
Event at COA, Plaça Nova 5
Book your seat (soon)
teenage engineering is developing the alternative future of consumer electronics, each invention designed to last. from reimagining music-making with the iconic OP-1 portable synthesizer and growing the synth population with the affordable pocket operator series, to rethinking listening with the OD-11 ortho directional speaker and the OB–4 magic radio, they have applied their signature mindset to a new legacy of enduring technologies.
Their creations have attracted collaborations with well-known artists and brands, sharing in their vision to integrate creativity into the everyday. teenage engineering was founded in 2007 and is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Jesper Kouthoofd is head of design, founder & CEO of teenage engineering. His work has been recognised in magazines such as New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Wallpaper, Wired, Popular Mechanics, G3 and many more across the globe. Together with his 40 engineers at teenage engineering he has launched products such as the already legendary synthesizer OP-1, pocket operators and reengineered the classic OD-11 (by Stig Carlsson). He believes in making products for everyone, no matter where you live or what language you speak.
Letters can be drawn in so many different ways. Cyrus Highsmith’s approach is based heavily on the importance of white space and sensitivity to shapes. It’s a method he applies to type design as well as image making of all kinds. For Highsmith, it’s a way of seeing the world. This workshop will be a messy, hands-on, and computer-free exploration of drawing, making, and thinking about letters.
The objective of this workshop is to spend a memorable week of drawing letters and making art.
Each day will be a series of demos and conversations with lots of time in between to work independently. We will experiment and play with different ways of drawing and thinking about letters. Techniques may include stencils, low tech printing, collage, and painting. Participants should be ready for new experiences, experimentation, play, and failure.
Cyrus Highsmith is a letter drawer, teacher, author, and graphic artist. He teaches type design at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
He wrote and illustrated the acclaimed primer Inside Paragraphs: Typographic Fundamentals.
In 2015, he received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for extraordinary contributions to the fields of type design, typography, and type education.
In 2017, he became Creative Director for Latin Type Development at Morisawa USA.
He goes to bed very early.
Our world is changing at a breathtaking pace. Technological progress is continuously leading to significant transformations. It is high time that we, as designers, courageously and critically engage with the technologies that shape our everyday lives. This requires that we consequently engage with the hidden structures that are hidden behind the visible surfaces. One method that makes this possible is called Creative Coding.
Tim Rodenbröker is a designer, entrepreneur and community builder. After several years of running his own studio and teaching at various international universities, he founded his own learning platform, around 2019, which he now runs full-time. As a creative technologist, he has worked for clients such as nytimes.com, IBM, CCCB, ZKM Karlsruhe, Slate+Ash, Holo Magazine, DEMO Festival and Springer Science and Business Media.
trcc (tim rodenbröker creative coding) is an international online learning platform with an associated community for creative coding in the realms of graphic design. With about 800 active students from all over the world and a broad network of experts from universities and agencies, festivals and conferences, the Patreon-funded platform is a globally renowned institution in the current landscape of creative coding education.
In this second session we will focus on contemporary books, analysing some examples that have won awards in recent years.
What is currently considered a well-designed book?
Through the verdict of the jury of the LAUS awards and the “Best Book Design From All Over The World” we will be able to take a look at recent editorial design and detect what the trends are in this field. We will be able to assess the adequacy between form and content and explore the role of the designer in the process of creating a book.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.
Event at COA, Plaça Nova 5
Book your seat (soon)
The Work of Repair
Amica will reflect on how architectural and creative practices can orientate themselves away from invention and innovation towards the patient and slow work of repair, and consider work that is based on making long-term, personal or ethical commitments to sites, situations, and social contexts. She will cover some of Assemble’s early work, before discussing a set of projects that reorientated her and the studio’s attitudes towards the city and the rural, material ethics and intergenerational justice.
Amica Dall is an inter-disciplinary practitioner focused on architecture and city culture and children’s right to the city. She is a founding member of Assemble, where she delivered more than 15 major projects over ten years. Her work as a writer and filmmaker has been broadcast on the BBC, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and published in E-Flux. She recently co-wrote a book on post-carbon future for architecture with architecture practice, Material Cultures. Amica has taught across a wide range of subjects and works with both children and post-graduates.
Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art. Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen. Turner Prize in 2016, and nominated in 2022 to the Royal Academy in recognition of their collective contribution to the culture of city making.
Giving voice to People
Peter will discuss reasons for designing type today, from seeking new possibilities within the Latin script, using cognitive research to fuel design project, to designing type for minority languages.
Peter Biľak works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design. In 1999 he started Typotheque type foundry, in 2000, together with Stuart Bailey he co-founded art & design journal Dot Dot Dot, in 2012 he started Works That Work, a magazine of unexpected creativity, in 2015 together with Andrej Krátky he co-founded Fontstand.com, a font rental platform. He collaborates with the choreographer Lukas Timulak on creation of modern dance performances.
Typotheque is a type Company giving shape to language, designing for communication in a world that is increasingly digital and multicultural.
Rewind and fastforward
Luna Maurer will elaborate on Moniker’s relation with technology in the past 20 years and its impact on their practice. Moniker is currently developing a new outlook and perspective on technology, sparked by recent rapid developments in the field. The web changed from an emancipating democratizing network into an infrastructure for big capital, the screen from a desktop publishing interface to a fundamental extension of our identity. Luna will share their latest experiments.
Luna Maurer is an interaction and media design artist. Originally from Stuttgart (Germany), she completed her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
With Roel Wouters she heads the Amsterdam based studio Moniker. Moniker is well known for authoring the Conditional Design Manifesto (together with Edo Paulus and Jonathan Puckey). Luna Maurer has been teaching media courses at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Sandberg Institute, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, HfG Karlsruhe and at Yale University School of Art.
Moniker explores the characteristics of technology and its influence on our daily lives. They have designed many participatory projects (online and offline), as well as other web projects, films and performances. Their clients range from cultural institutions like Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Fondation Beyeler, Basel to more technology oriented clients like the Mozilla Foundation, Unity 3D and Google.
Moniker has won many awards, including a British Music Video Award, a Webby, several Dutch Design Awards and the Amsterdam Prijs voor de Kunst.
dahyunhwang.com
hhha.online
@da_hyonni
@hejhellohalloannyeong
Open to the public
Dahyun will talk about how we can convert analog into digital things and explore the possibilities of the web. Furthermore, how can we create exciting websites in unexpected ways? And how can we use online tools for better communication nowadays?
Dahyun Hwang is a graphic designer. She studied visual communication at University of Seoul in Korea and finished her master’s at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. She thinks about how we can connect analog and digital. She is also a co-initiator of HHHA, a creative coding collective. She has participated in ‘Post Modern Child’ Exhibition in MoCA Busan and ‘POST IT!’ Exhibition in Tokyo. Her works have been featured in Monthly Design, It’s Nice That, CA Magazine, and so on.
HHHA (Hej Hello Hallo Annyeong) is a creative coding collective in which female creators gather to share and explore web-based works. Dahyun Hwang co-initiated HHHA with Naree Shin, and they gathered other teammates living in various places such as Germany, Denmark, and Korea.
To curate means to care. Literally. In the case of design, these objects – and the exhibitions they are featured in – talk about the human drive for progress, about creative leadership, about material economies and technological innovations. But what does it mean to curate within the field of design in the 21st century? How can exhibitions and books make a contribution to fostering more just, socially and ecologically sustainable societies? In her lecture, she will provide insights into the hands-on practice of curating, and into the broader issues that may inform how we present, discuss and practice design in the future.
Viviane Stappmanns is a curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. She is interested in exploring the contribution curators can make to rethinking design as a practice concerned with ecological and social sustainability. In her exhibition and teaching work, she experiments with new, collaborative approaches to curating and exhibiting. She has taught at different schools and universities, among them the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and, most recently the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe.
Prior to working at the Vitra Design Museum, Viviane has worked as an editor and curator within architecture and design contexts in Australia and Germany, and holds degrees in Interior Design and Journalism.
The exhibition “Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today!” (2021) will open at the Barcelona Design Museum in October 2023. Currently, she is working on the international travelling exhibition “Garden Futures”, due to open at the Vitra Design Museum in Spring 2023.
Latest projects
In an accelerated world, every aspect of our lives is in constant change. At Folch we bring together different disciplines to respond to every brief, always seeking to have an atypical vision. Each project is an opportunity to design concepts, brands, narratives and digital events, reaching and involving audiences to this new liquid paradigm.
Folch Creative-driven brand ecosystem. Acid House (creative and business innovation hub in Barcelona and Madrid), White Horse (creative production), Avanti Studio (city branding & way finding ), NOW (digital innovation and transformation), Creative Services (fashion and e-commerce), PILLS (digital education), Gallery Studio (New music formats), G.Records (Record label), Gallery (Music Innovation), Eldorado Agency (outdoor creative agency), J.Franc (3D visualization and AR/VR solutions), FFF (Digital type foundry) and Self (talent management).
Only for MED students
Introduction to the Enric Bricall Special Collection, a collection of books whose design and typography represent excellence in 20th century editorial design. We will offer a historical review from 1900 to Postmodernism, passing through the interwar avant-garde, the New Typography and Swiss graphics.
We will look at some representative books from each period and analyse their characteristics. We will try to understand where their importance lies and why they have gone down in the history of graphic design as canonical examples of editorial design in the last century.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.
Only for MVD students
Degrow or grow in another way?
The value of a project cannot be measured only in monetary terms. And we are clear about that.
It is important for us to develop ideas and concepts that contribute to society, that help to fulfill an objective and that lead us to think beyond the limits. We call these projects ‘pro-bono’ and they are part of the commitment we have with others and with society, but especially with our community of designers.
How do we organize pro-bono projects? How do we limit collaboration so that it is sustainable for both parties? How do we maintain the client relationship over time?
Pablo Juncadella
Co-founder and creative director at Mucho. Thanks to his constant search for new challenges, Pablo was promoted to the position of Creative Director of the English newspaper The Observer after working as a graphic designer for grafica and Pentagram. His global vision and his great interest in visual knowledge have been fundamental contributions to the growth of the studio. Today, together with his team at Mucho, he works with the purpose of finding solutions that fit in the positioning of the brands by contributing with original ideas.
Title
Description of the session
Robbie Whitehead (London, 1988) is the editorial director of the magazine Apartment. In 2010, after finishing his graphic design studies in Sydney, Australia, he came to Barcelona to work on the publication. In it, together with its founders Nacho Alegre, Omar Sosa and Marco Velardi, is responsible for the editorial direction of the magazine and the rest of the brand’s editorial projects, directing in a close manner a network of photographers, writers and illustrators of recognition international.
Apartamento is widely recognised as today’s most influential, inspiring, and honest interiors magazine. International, well designed, simply written, and tastefully curated since 2008, it is an indispensable resource for individuals who are passionate about the way they live. The publication is published biannually from its headquarters in Barcelona. It also has offices in New York, Milan and Berlin.
After more than 10 years collaborating with designers for the creation of digital projects, we will analyze relevant works of our trajectory, share experiences and give examples of how to prepare the ideal hand off for the development of a website, making life easier for the developer and minimizing feedback and unforeseen events.
Clara Layti is a web programmer at LLOS& since 2020. She has led the development of web projects produced by studios such as Folch, Hey, Affaire or Proxi, among others. Working with the latest web development technologies, she seeks to adapt to the needs of each project to offer the best user experience. He studied Creation and Development of Digital Activities, specializing in UX design and web programming.
LLOS& is a web development studio in Barcelona specialized in pixel-perfect front-end finishing.
Our projects are programmed from scratch with emphasis on aesthetics, animations and interactions, almost always executed by the hand of art direction and design professionals.
We, humans, struggle to build empathy towards large amounts of information. ¿How do we solve these challenges when the problems we face today are so inherently big, interconnected, wicked, and globalized? In this talk, we will explore some humble experiments done to overcome this lack of empathy through art, technology, and participatory experiences.
Pau Garcia is a media designer and the co-founder of Domestic Data Streamers, a 25 people studio that since 2013 has been focused on creating info-experiences. He also leads de Master in Data Design at Elisava. He is a guest lecturer at The New School (NYC), Hong Kong Design Institute, the Royal College of Arts (London), Politecnico di Milano and the Barcelona School of Economics. He built and permanently lives in the Residence for Artists HeyHuman! and is part of the Posttraumatic Collective. Usually, he doesn’t speak in the third person.
Domestic Data Streamers is an award-winning studio exploring how to express data through film, robotics, code, theater, or architecture in schools, prisons, cinemas, the streets of many cities, and even the United Nations Headquarters. They work for commercial brands and all kinds of old-school and new-kinky institutions. They truly believe data can be a real trigger of change and build bridges in a polarized society.
Pràctica: Graphic Hunting
Exploring our reality allows us to understand the creative potential that lies behind everything that surrounds us; In this session we will analyse, through visualising the latest Pràctica case studies, how our environment and surroundings can become an inexhaustible source of inspiration if we really pay attention.
Anna Berbiela
Graphic designer, creative director, and illustrator based in Barcelona. Anna Berbiela is co-founder, together with Javier Arizu, Carlos Bermúdez, and Albert Porta, of the design studio Pràctica. With offices in Barcelona and New York, Pràctica believes that design it’s a process involving researching, thinking, sharing, challenging… then giving all this a definitive shape.
Pràctica is a design and identity studio based in Barcelona and New York that seeks to reveal the particular truth of each brand. By simplifying complexity and shaping concepts, creates work that makes sense.
Making a book means undertaking a complex task which is eminently collective. In addition to those who create content, design it and print the resulting book, other roles and knowledge must be involved whose participation is not always visible from the outside. This session will review all of the agents involved in editorial publishing, as well as some of the types of balance that can be established between such roles throughout the work process.
In her professional career, Mela Dávila Freire has combined institutional work – at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Museo Reina Sofía, among others– with research,writing, editing and curating. Her work focuses in particular on artist publications and art archives, spanning topics such as the theoretical and practical overlaps between archives and art collections, the ideological biases in archival structures,and the feminist revision of the genre of artists’ publications.
Her most recent book, Mission and Commission: documenta and the Art Market, 1955 – 1968, deals with the relationship between the early documenta exhibitions and the incipient art market through the publication of multiples and graphic works.
Blanding, The Branding Paradox
I’ve come to believe one thing: Brands are like people. Some are understated. Some are loud. Some funny. Some communicate by exclaiming! Some have terrible grammar. Brands aren’t created in a vacuum; they’re products of the world around them. Formed around the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, a brand is as much about what it isn’t as what it is. The point is differentiation; that’s what branding is. That’s why I’m so baffled by the current epidemic of what I call blanding—branding not to stand out at all, but to blend in. With results that are, in a word, bland.
Thierry Brunfaut is a creative director and one of the founding partners of Base Design, the international network of branding studios based in Brussels, New York, Geneva, and Melbourne. He is the author of the renowned 5–Minute poster series, a professor, and a regular speaker at design and branding conferences around the world. Thierry bears a striking and seemingly contradictory resemblance both to Moby and Kermit the frog.
Base Design creates brands with cultural impact. Our team of creatives, strategists, and digital experts design and develop simple yet powerful brands, and build unique personalities. Base knows that branding is first and foremost about people, so specializes in helping companies – whether new or established; large or small – to become human-centric brands with vision, clarity, and empathy. Founded in the early ‘90s, the company has evolved continuously over the years and is now steered by partners across all four studios.
Off track
In this lecture Vrints-Kolsteren will take you into their creative process. From their sources of inspiration to the way they build visual systems.
Like a game, a visual identity is build up from a set of rules. How to apply these rules will determine the end result. The trick is to navigate freely within the game, like a traveler that goes off track but has a map to feel safe.
Vrints-Kolsteren is an Antwerp based design studio founded by Vincent Vrints and Naomi Kolsteren in 2015, working both locally and internationally. The bureau’s forte is developing visual identities with a clear and strong focus on typography. When working on an identity, they create a system, a set of rules, which can evolve over time.
Additionally, dealing with the organic opposed to rudimentary shapes and straight lines is a recurring narrative within their practice.
Vrints-Kolsteren puts an emphasis on collaboration and likes to work closely with their clients. They don’t want to view the client as a client, in the strict sense of the word, rather they consider all parties to be equal.
Vrints-Kolsteren is influenced by the modernist period, with clear references to that time, its designers and artists, which can be soon in their attention for form, linework, and most importantly, the use of grids and rulesets.
Only for MED students
The work of the designers Muriel Cooper and Irma Boom serves to reflect on the phenomenon of the designer as author. Learning from Las Vegas was one of the seminal texts of postmodern architecture, but the design of the book was the cause of confrontation between its authors and Muriel Cooper due to the lack of adequacy between substance and form. A similar case is that of Irma Boom, who claims her creative autonomy in the process of creating the book. Two very strong personalities that refute the image of the “invisible designer”.
Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.
The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
Muriel Cooper. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972
Irma Boom. The architecture of the book. Eindhoven: Lecturis, 2013
In this talk, artist and designer, Sarah Boris will talk about her shifting practice from being an in house designer and art director for some of the leading art institutions in the UK, to setting up her own studio in 2015. She will present some of her personal and non commercial projects that have shaped her practice and are informing new directions including self-published projects such as ‘Global Warming Anyone?’, or her artist book ‘Le Théâtre Graphique’ and her latest sculptural heart shaped bench design.
Sarah Boris is an artist and graphic designer based in London. After working for over ten years for organisations such as Phaidon, the Barbican Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, she set up on her own in 2015, with a focus on visual identities, editorial design and developing her personal art practice. Her clients include The Photographers’ Gallery, Tate, The National Gallery and Christie’s to name a few.
In parallel to commissioned projects Sarah creates screenprinted artworks during artist residencies. Her work was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and was exhibited at the Design Museum in London and at Une Saison Graphique, Le Havre, France. She was judge president for D&AD book design in 2016 and is on the graphic design jury for the Latin American Design Awards 2022.
Only for MED students
In the 1960s the modern canon began to be questioned. Social unrest and countercultural movements found their way into graphic design. A new aesthetic far removed from the Swiss grid gave way to playful typographical compositions that connected with the “words in freedom” of the artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century, especially Futurism and Dadaism. Robert Massin in France and Corita Kent in the USA mastered the use of the printed word in their creations.
Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.
The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
Massin. La cantatrice chauve. Paris: Gallimard, 1964
Sister Corita. Footnotes and headlines: a play-pray book. New York: Herder and Herder, 1967
Influenced as much by feminism as Swiss typography, Lucienne will share her graphic design journey from utopian zeal to dystopian dilemma. She has always considered graphic design to be a political act. In the early days this message was greeted with incredulity but when her book Good: An Introduction to Ethics in Graphic Design hit the streets the subject was inching onto the agenda. Since then, she and colleagues have curated / designed exhibitions about graphic design in health and politics:
(Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? and Hope to Nope: Graphic Design and Politics 2008–18), worked on multiple NGO campaigns; helped spread the word about climate change; and most recently developed the installation Perhaps it’s not you, it’s me. in which Lucienne contemplates ‘leaving’ her long-standing partner Graphic Design. Here she explains why divorce was an option, argues for the value of graphic design and ponders on what we all need to do next.
Lucienne Roberts is founder of design studio LR+ and co-founder of advocacy initiative GD&. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Lucienne’s practice is characterised by her abiding interest in ethical design. LR+ work spans exhibition design, books and corporate identity. GD& creates vivid books and exhibitions that explore how graphic design connects with all other things. Projects include the originating and co-curation of two critically-acclaimed London exhibitions: Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? and Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18.
Only for MED students
Lost in Translation
On your way to becoming an editorial designer, you are confronted with exploring and producing common formats such as books, magazines or websites. For some time now, the discipline’s range of work has been steadily expanding; demands are changing. Collaboration with other disciplines, working with new formats is more necessary and exciting today than ever.
How can new things emerge in exchange with other specialists? How do we approach unknown formats and what are their characteristics? This workshop week will give us time to challenge ourselves and explore our skills as authors and producers of unconventional or even unknown formats.
Serge Rompza
After graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Serge Rompza has co-founded the Berlin and Oslo based design studio NODE in 2003, together with Anders Hofgaard.
The two offices collaboratively focus on identity, print, exhibition and interactive work. Clients include Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Vitra, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), Lithuanian Pavilion / La Biennale di Venezia, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Since 2004, he has regularly been teaching at art and design academies across Europe.
Only for MED students
Swiss graphics led the international scene after the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s the Swiss style, a refined version of the New Typography, had become the universal solution to any visual communication need from book design to poster design to advertising and corporate image. Max Bill and Karl Gerstner, among many others, created a sophisticated language rooted in the avant-garde to communicate with the consumer society.
Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.
The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
Max Bill. Form. Basel: Karl Werner, 1952
Karl Gerstner. Geigy heute. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1958
Only for MVD students
Systemic Type Design
We live in a (new) golden age of systemic type design. New technologies and easy to use programmes leveled the playfield for emerging designers and gave them the chance to experiment with new ideas. The world of display fonts has witnessed a lot of new impulses in the last years. Type has become more flexible, variable and kinetic as ever, adjusting efficiently and effectively to new communication channels.
Systemic Type Design is more than designing fonts. A type system is an efficient design tool that helps designers to design. If done well, the act of writing is the act of designing without the need to further layout the text. In this course we will develop an experimental type system that almost automatically generates fantastic design applications.
Martin Lorenz
might as well have become a cook, a comic artist or an architect, were it not for an internship at Müller+Volkmann. Lorenz studied Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague. After working four years at the design agency Hort, he moved to Barcelona to found TwoPoints.Net with Lupi Asensio and do his MA and PhD in Design Research at the UB. Lorenz has taught since 2006 for Elisava and still likes to cook.
This lecture talks about the diverse trials faced when attempting to expand the range of our capacity within web environments by questioning standard web design templates. The talk features Anti-User-Friendly, an ongoing project that challenges the concept of user-friendliness by creating a content-focused website.
Web tools work as a bridge connecting the user and the device-website to narrow the world wide web down to a ‘village wide web’ and transform the web into an extended space.
Yehwan Song is a graphic web designer. She runs her own independent design studio focusing on the strategic use of technologies. Her work involves projects with multiple cultural organizations, including ifa, LIMA Media Art, Rhizome, Typojanchi, and Seoul Museum of Art.
She has participated in a number of exhibitions—Venice Biennale (Korean pavilion), Seoul Biennale(SBAU), and others; and her works have been featured in such magazines as Étapes, Monthly DESIGN, It’s Nice That, among others.
Yehwan Song Studio is a web design and a web development studio questioning standardized design and interface conventions that frame users’ behavior and the templates that make them lose their content awareness and become accustomed to oversimplification. We construct outside-the-frame devices and interfaces in order to challenge the notion of user-friendliness. We pursue diversity and variety in the web environment above efficiency.
We will reflect from some projects elaborated in 131 during the last years, in which starting from typography we work to recover the local and collective memory.
Esteve Padilla.
Barcelona, 1983
Graphic designer, half of the 131 studio and occasional teacher at various universities. Graduated in graphic design at Eina (UAB).
131
(Pau Llop, Esteve Padilla) is a graphic design office based in Barcelona and Lleida. Typography understood as image, form or letter is a substantial element in all the projects we do. Our work includes art direction, identities, editorial projects, websites and typography.
Pràctica: Process
Pràctica does not have a style, but it follows a process; In this session, we will analyze, through the case studies of the latest studio projects, the process that Pràctica follows to develop its work.
Anna Berbiela
Graphic designer based in Barcelona. Anna founded the studio Pràctica together with Javier Arizu, Carlos Bermúdez and Albert Porta in 2018. With offices in Barcelona and New York, Pràctica is a studio that works for institutional, cultural, and commercial clients, developing communication projects in printed, digital, and environmental matters.
Pràctica is a full-service design studio based in Barcelona and New York. Working for institutional, cultural, and commercial clients, always seeks powerful concepts, bold visual codes, and customized solutions for each project. This is translated into a very eclectic job; Their style is the lack of one, it’s finding the best solution for each project.
The act of making something public
This session addresses the methods, tools and implications of publishing activities.
— What does the publication does/mean? And how is it going to exist/circulate?
— How does it achieve its aspirations through form?
— How do content, editorial concept and design come together?
— How to think publishing as complement and supplement to working practices?
— In which terms can ‘making public’ act as a tool for bringing common shared interests and concerns?
Book Bindery
The BB allows the production of books and publications in small editions and specific manipulations of paper and cardboard. All processes are always done entirely by hand and pushing the limits of what is possible.
Next to being a technical workshop, the BB functions as a cross-departmental point in our institution. We believe the publishing practice is an emancipatory process. We support project such as: PUB.sandberg.nl, Radio Rietveld and Rietveld Journal.
Miquel Hervás Gómez
(Terrassa, 19 April 1985). Handy graphic design freelancer based in the www. Running as a workshop manager at the BB. Tutor for Disarming Design at the Sandberg Instituut and Preparatory Course at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, while being member of fanfare and Carne Kids.
fanfare was established in the observation of a context, a network, within which design and art interactions resulted in projects not suiting within the existing platforms for presentation. fanfare creates a framework to connect already existing structures. What organically happened in this context was the creation of new structures, new networks, new initiatives. We allow ourselves in the context of today to speak about fanfare as framework for (non)physical publishing.
fanfare is a platform and design studio for cross-disciplinary collaboration and visual communication. Through an active programme, fanfare generates, explores, and curates environments for visual interactions.
Since the start in 2014, fanfare has created a unique space for experiments, explorations and collaborations in the realm of graphic design and related disciplines. Through their research and design practice, fanfare sharpens and challenges the notion of visual communication.
Miquel Hervás Gómez
(Terrassa, 19 de abril de 1985). Diseñador gráfico autónomo afincado en la www. Funcionando como jefe de taller en la BB. Tutor de Disarming Design en el Sandberg Instituut y del Curso Preparatorio en la Gerrit Rietveld Academie, a la vez que miembro de fanfare y Carne Kids.
Ruben Pater (1977, NL) (he/him) works between journalism and graphic design. Under the name Untold Stories, Pater creates visual narratives that support solidarity, justice, and equality. Pater finds himself being a designer at a time when design is last thing the world needs. Until more ethical approaches present themselves, he designs, writes, and teaches. He is a tutor at the BA Graphic Design, and the MA Non Linear Narrative at KABK. The Politics of Design, is his first book about cultural bias in graphic design. His second book CAPS LOCK looks at the role of graphic design in capitalism.
CAPS LOCK
Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.
CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.
CAPS LOCK is an inspirational book full of sources for design students, educators and visual communicators all over the world, just like Ruben’s first book The Politics of Design.
Only for MED students
Two crucial works of New Typography, the avant-garde movement that revolutionised graphic design in the interwar period. The increasing availability of the photographic image played a fundamental role in this new approach to editorial design. Moholy-Nagy, a member of the legendary Bauhaus, and Jan Tschichold, author of the landmark work Die neue Typographie, radically changed the face of the printed page, producing a lasting impact whose effects continue to this day.
Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.
The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.
The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.
Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
László Moholy-Nagy. Malerei, Fotografie, Film. München: Albert Langen, 1925
Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge. Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind, 1929
Two hours filled with semantics, politics and graphic design, appropriately illustrated with works by Bendita Gloria.
Santi Fuster
Graphic designer.
50% of Bendita Gloria.
Bendita Gloria is a design studio founded by Alba Rosell and Santi Fuster. Focusing on identity and editorial projects, their work has won certain attention because of its particular conceptual approach. Since 2007, Bendita Gloria strives to turn their projects into interesting reading matter.
MUTUO
Méndez Núñez, 7
08003 Barcelona
Throughout our lives, women, or people with vaginas, will visit the gynecologist multiple times. The Public Health recommendation is to do it every 1-3 years, depending on individual circumstances, however, more than 50% of women will not follow this recommendation. It is not news that almost no woman likes going to the gynecologist. Unfortunately, feeling anxiety, fear, vulnerability, shame, and discomfort are part of the common experience of many women when visiting this specialist. But, why do we experience it this way?
The lack of sensitivity and empathy towards a patient in an extremely vulnerable position, the judgment, infantilization, paternalism, the lack of scientific advancement, misinformation, the taboo or normalization of female pain are some of the subtle forms of patriarchal violence that women suffer in relation to our intimate health. A violence that occurs in a medical context where, apparently, the values of care and attention prevail, and where precisely the opposite of violence is expected.
Gynecological violence affects half the population, it is a complex and systemic problem in which a multitude of factors intervene and in which we all participate more or less consciously. This exhibition seeks to detect and denormalize these situations as an indispensable first step for change.
1. Behaviour
The gynecological visit differs from any other medical examination due to the high level of vulnerability to which patients are exposed. Of course, it is not the same to talk to a doctor while dressed and sitting at a table, than to do it naked, with your legs spread and without seeing how a stranger manipulates tools in your vagina.
Vulnerability awakens in our mind the same response as a physical threat; we interpret the lack of control of the situation as a danger and we become extremely sensitive. For this reason, the gynecological examination requires a high degree of empathy, respect and care on the part of the professionals, to avoid hurting or discomforting the person treated.
However, too often, women experience a lack of sensitivity from their doctors, judicious treatment, contempt and even discriminatory treatment according to their sexual practices or orientation.
The Most Uncomfortable Moment
This first piece invites you to sit down, open your legs in a gynecological-examination position and, from that position, read the testimonies that appear projected.
These are real testimonies collected in an investigation where 82 women participated, who relate some of the most uncomfortable moments they have experienced in a gynecological consultation related to the behaviour of the professionals attending them.
2. The Instrument
The vaginal speculum is an instrument used for gynecological examinations that allows, by dilating the walls of the vagina, to observe the cervix. This characteristic tool, with a look similar to a torture weapon, was invented less than 200 years ago by Marion Sims, known as the “father of modern gynecology”. Despite all its benefits, the speculum has an obscure origin, connected to patriarchal authority and institutional racism, as Sims used black slaves for years to perform experimental surgeries without anesthesia. From the first model used by Sims and later perfected by Thomas Graves in 1870, the instrument has hardly changed.
Currently, regarding its most practical function, the speculum is a tool that does its job and does it well, allowing the pap smear (a test that in recent years has reduced the incidence and mortality from cervix cancer up to 70-80%). However, the speculum has barely changed in its 200-year history and remains a poorly suited design for the patient’s comfort.
Revising the speculum
This chapter of the exhibition focuses on the ideology and politics that objects hide behind their design, beyond their utilitarian character. Through speculative sketches, we reflect on the speculum and how it materializes a patriarchal vision that does not prioritize the comfort of the patient, an object lacking in evolution that, in the hands of doctors, represents authority and power.
Reaction to the speculum
The design and appearance of the speculum, as well as the experience of patients who have used it, make it one of the most hated instruments. This interactive piece displays the most common reactions when viewing this device. When opening the speculum you will see a word accompanied by the number of people who wrote it in response to the open field question: “What word comes to mind when you see this device? (followed by an image of a speculum). “
These are some of the other words indicated:
Anxiety, old-fashioned, self-awareness, open, control, dehumanizing, facilitator, exploration, tool, horror, introspection, invasion, fear, annoyance, monster, mosquito, obsolescence, panic, pap smear, childbirth, pressure, review, noise, tension, violence.
3. The Pill
The contraceptive pill has been one of the most popular and revolutionary drugs of recent decades, as well as one of the most controversial. The first mass-use drug for non-sick people also has a sordid origin linked to colonialism. The first trials of the American pill in the 1950s were carried out in Costa Rica for eugenic purposes of population control in poor women who agreed to take the pill and suffered serious side effects, without being aware that they were part of a pharmacological experiment.
Since then, millions and millions of women have taken this combined progesterone and estrogen hormonal drug, currently 150 million people worldwide. Despite its positive effect on the movements for sexual liberation and female emancipation, the history of this pill continues to be marked by a lack of consent, of full disclosure, of a truly informed choice, as well as a lack of clinically relevant research regarding risks and possible alternatives.
Side effects
According to a study done in the USA, three out of every five women stop taking the pill during the first year of use due to its side effects. Mostly, effects about which patients are not informed. Side effects ignored by everyone, unlike other drugs. For example, the risk of thrombosis of the pill is 0.1% (1 in 1000), which has not been an impediment to its commercialization, on the contrary, the risk of thrombosis in the vaccine against Covid-19 Astra Zeneca, which is only 0.0006% (30 out of 5 million), meant stopping vaccination worldwide for a few weeks.
Reasons to take the pill
Regardless of the virtues or defects of the contraceptive pill, in recent decades it has been massively prescribed by medical professionals, and there is currently a debate about whether in some cases there is an unnecessary over-prescription. However, today, the contraceptive pill remains the only “remedy” or “resource” in Western medicine to treat certain gynecological problems such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or Endometriosis. In data, this means that more than half of people (58%) who use hormonal contraceptives do so for purposes other than preventing pregnancy.
The recipe wall displays the following data:
— 42% of people who use a hormonal contraceptive do so exclusively for contraceptive purposes
— 44% of people who use a hormonal contraceptive do so for some other reason additionally to contraception.
— 14% of people who use hormonal contraception do so exclusively for purposes other than contraception
These are the total percentages of people who use hormonal contraceptives by reason:
— Contraceptive: 86%
— Menstrual pain: 31%
— Menstrual regulation: 28%
— Acne: 14%
— Endometriosis: 4%
4. Normalization
Ignoring and normalizing women’s pain is another form of gynecological violence. In a 1974 study medical students reported that they had been instructed by their professors to assume that women’s ailments are psychosomatic until proven otherwise. Unfortunately, today there are still traces of that thought that belittles the pain that comes from a woman.
In the case of menstrual pain, its normalization also extends outside the gynecological consultation, in general society. 51% of women and 52% of men believe that period pain is something that women have to deal with. However, menstruating is a physiological need just like eating, and shouldn’t hurt.
Menstrual pain
Silence, normalization and ignorance of menstrual pain run deep and have serious consequences. Although menstruating should not be painful, the data shows that a high percentage of women suffer periodically from period pain. This piece visualizes and contrasts some real events – the percentages of women suffering from dysmenorrhea and endometriosis – with the normalization of this pain – represented through objects commonly used as a “remedy” for pain. By lifting these objects, we discover the consequences of such normalization.
5. Paternalism
The strong paternalistic tradition of Western medicine is accentuated in gynecology. The fact that the patients are women and the widespread misinformation about our own bodies due to a lack of education, makes this form of authoritarianism very present. To this day, there is still a strong hierarchical relationship between doctor and patient, where many times the former imposes and decides for the latter, without giving explanations. In this way, the figure of the medical savior and the infantilization of the ignorant woman continue to be perpetuated.
This paternalism is a direct consequence of the patriarchal system and extends beyond the individual attitude of medical professionals, as it is also exercised by the State through laws and policies.
Imposed waiting
The sexual and reproductive health law on voluntary termination of pregnancy is a clear example of the paternalism of the system. In Spain, according to this law, every woman who decides to have an abortion during the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy must wait a period of at least three days, from when she goes to the medical center and receives information, until she can have an abortion. This imposed waiting time known as the “reflection period” is a clear questioning of the ethical capacity of women to decide. In Spain, there is no other intervention that, by law, requires something similar.
This piece reflects on paternalism in the field of gynecology through the experience of waiting. The recording shows an experiment in which I sat waiting for three days. The video is accompanied by two bases that expose and oppose a pistol to an abortion medication, referring to the reflection period imposed to abort in Spain and the minimum of 3 days of waiting required in the US to buy a weapon.
Conclusión
La violencia ginecológica es una realidad extendida de formas muy distintas; a través de dinámicas sutiles como el trato juicioso y carente de empatía, la falta de investigación y avance científico, la patologización de procesos naturales, la falta de educación e información, la invisibilización y menosprecio al dolor o la normalización de una sistema sanitario paternalista.
La violencia ginecológica es un problema sistémico, no tiene individuos culpables porque todos formamos parte de este sistema. En gran parte, dicha violencia se ejerce de forma involuntaria o inconsciente y es normalizada por todos y todas: ginecólogos, pacientes, industria y estado. Una consecuencia o materialización más del sistema patriarcal que aún sufrimos a día de hoy. Por lo tanto, todas somos víctimas a la vez que agentes de cambio.
Acabar con la violencia ginecológica pasa por revisar nuestras propias vivencias desde una perspectiva crítica, por contar y hablar de ello y por aprender sobre nuestros propios cuerpos. Detectar, desnormalizar y denunciar situaciones que nos hacen sentir incómodas o violentadas es el primer paso para conseguir una ginecología respetuosa y una reconciliación entre doctores y pacientes.
MUTUO
Méndez Núñez, 7
08003 Barcelona
We live in a “fit” society, where gyms are temples of transformation towards a globalized stereotype. The cult of the body plans and controls our daily routines and ends up shaping our identity, fueling the fitness industry, which is only growing.
At the same time we are in the age of information, of data; it is said that having information is power, and we can apply it to this fitness paradigm as well. We design our body in gyms by entering data (15 repetitions of squats for 3 sets, 100 grams of rice…) para construir el cuerpo ideal and at the same time gain individual power. The beauty acaba siendo algo measured, weighed, equated, and compared.
The bodies that visualize this in the most extreme way are body-builders. Mass body, corporal and data body, representing a bodily ideal of power. We all see this social group as far from our reality, but the body-builders of the past are the fitness followers of the present.
Sport today has become a complex commercial, political and social activity, where the healthy body is confused with the aesthetic body, moulding the canons of beauty and our self-esteem at will. And the way we get entangled is by following these data rituals.
The body on display
We exhibit a body built with effort and sacrifice. And with it, a feeling of self-satisfaction fills us. In the past, cultivating muscular strength had a practical purpose: carrying logs to light fires, defending our homes, etc. The contemporary era works on strength to enlarge muscles with an aesthetic and static objective, whose sole purpose is exhibition.
“How does it feel to get on the platform as a bodybuilder?”
The audio corresponds to the testimony of my own gym trainer.
High extreme power bodypuzzle workout
The body becomes proportions, the classical beauty comes from the balance of the parts, from the perfect measure with which each detail is worked. Therefore, the bodybuilder, like the sculptor, dissects the body into small fragments, which must be perfect in their conception, but also in their assembly. The body-builder is a body-puzzle; but also a “signature body”, since each of its fragments is molded “in the manner of”. The perfect body is sold in “pieces” and bought in “installments”, and some of these will take years to be fulfilled, possibly never even achieved.
We follow body references to transform our body, and most of them end up being the celebrities we see in the media. This routine has been created by collecting data from people who have acquired social power and have become referents thanks to a part of their body. This survey has been conducted on instagram and in gyms where they have given us these answers.
Data body trophies
We live in the society of the constructed body, of the transformed body. Where the media, advertising, and social networks instill in us that there is an inversely proportional relationship between appearance and power.
To achieve power it seems essential to have a strong and muscular body, this has been used as a symbol and therefore as a form of communication. Therefore, when we set out to “improve our physique” or “start operation bikini” we are basically pursuing the self-imposed idea of success in the contemporary era.
We end up in gyms transforming the body from a shapeless mass to a sculpted body and at the same time building an iconography of the supermuscle that means “power”.
From the question “what part of your body makes you feel empowered?” and “what part of your body makes you feel insecure?” These bodies are sculpted and molded. Power answers give volume and insecurity answers deflate it. The survey was conducted digitally and also analogically in different gyms . The separation between sexes responds to the very distinction made in these sports centers.
Community control scale
The fitness body exists because someone else looks at it. This transformation to power is meaningless if it cannot be observed, would we still desire these bodies if we lived alone in the world?
We examine ourselves, we judge and compare, we reflect our body in that of others. Going to the gym means submitting to a bombardment of evaluative gazes, it means entering the new contemporary panopticon.
Health has become a matter of class, where we judge those who do not fit this model by taking superficial values, such as weight and measurements. We control the fitness individual through numbers to such an extent that 3 out of 4 people in Spain recognize that they are not happy with their current weight.
In this social model the body is a symbol of identity, and how we work it reflects what we want to be:
Tell me how you work your body and I will tell you who you are. weigh yourself and so we know each other!
This scale does not give the personal weight, but visualizes the total of all of us who have passed through here, reinforcing the feeling of community and control that is established in gyms.
Viral bench press
But we not only look at ourselves, we also seek external approval. We put ourselves on our own stage on social media, we expose ourselves with poses and we are valued with likes. Our competition translates into the instagram feed. We produce our body to immortalize it in a photo, without this image our sacrifice is meaningless. Gyms have become the centers where we take the most selfies, currently the hashtag #gym has 208,566,606 publications of which 9 out of 10 are selfies. In a world of images, our effort acquires value when it translates into a postable photograph.
Do you want to go viral? With this machine you will get followers tripling in each set of exercises. Increase the weight in relation to the impact on networks you want to achieve, the more weight the more likes!
Narcissus machine
But in gyms we not only observe each other, we spend most of the time looking at ourselves and seeking our own approval: we are in the age of egoism and the continuous cult of the ego.
In the mirrors we design the ego as if we were sculptors, we use the data to know how to gain volume or to reduce it. We gain power in each set, in each repetition, we increase the weight…. We calculate our movements to produce the image we want to be, following the same laws that govern consumption: immediacy and utility.
Currently 30% of Spaniards claim to control the portions they eat, counting calories and 71% follow fitness routines daily from their smartphone. Now, Narciso has not only fallen in love with his image, but has produced it, needing to show it off.
The Narcissus machine allows you to work on the cult of the body and the cult of the ego in unison. Don’t stop looking at yourself while you think about who you want to be!
Prayers for mass fitness
In Spain, there are more than 4,000 sports facilities operating and generating a business of 2,291 million euros. Currently there are more than 5.5 million users registered in gyms, five times the number of users registered in soccer clubs. On youtube there are more than 30 million fitness videos and the #fittok challenge on Tiktok has more than 2 trillion repetitions that not even in 900 thousand years would we finish watching it all. A huge community has been built that communicates through magazines, social networks, blogs and gyms. We have become accustomed to a bombardment of messages that are far from the healthy sense of sport and that we have already normalized, creating a whole moral imaginary. We want to stand out from the crowd and achieve self-confidence, but we actually end up becoming a mass.
This mass inhabits gyms, and they have become the new temples where people go in search of disconnection, peace and pleasure. Places where talking seems to be forbidden and where healthy image has become a divine principle. We follow routines where personal sacrifice translates into sweat and time, with highly programmed rituals with the desire for constant self-improvement; we separate food between “pure”, like tuna rice, and “impure”, like pizza; we look for “high protein” or “no sugar added” as gospels in our supermarkets; and then we end up blinded in a bodily hedonism, but does this effort really produce a more satisfying life? Welcome to the new contemporary religion: We are bodybuilders.
Body cult messages are instilled in us daily as if they were prayers. These 120 are real messages from magazines, instagram accounts, workout websites and gyms that make us question the role of personal freedom over the body.
The exhibition traces the work as art director of Vogue Spain of Óscar Germade, between 2017 and 2021. The space is divided into four parts: Art Direction, linked to the visual part and design direction of the magazine. Covers, with a review of the work on covers of the last four years. “Making of”, where the design process of each part of the magazine is shown, from a technical and specific point of view.
Typography, with a purely visual retrospective of the design of Chamberí, ad-hoc typography designed by Íñigo Jerez for the magazine, which Eugenia de la Torriente, director of the magazine between January 2017 and December 2020, describes “Chamberí is a seemingly irreconcilable combination of rationality and exuberance. It starts from a very Cartesian skeleton, but has a final visual part of a more folkloric spirit, if it can be called that, thanks to a series of details that refer to Spanish tradition such as accents, crossbars and ascending curves. As it grows, it is playful, joyful and warm, and so far removed from its rational base that it is hard to recognize it.”
The sum of these spaces is a complete immersion in the work involved in the art direction of a fashion magazine today, with the complexity of inheriting the history of a masthead like Vogue, linked to figures of enormous transcendence such as Alexander Liberman: “art director of Vogue in the US and editorial director of Condé Nast, and who in his more than 50 years at the company laid the foundations of this masthead and many others. Liberman’s layouts were very simple because he made a very direct use of layout, with few flourishes in the text. In recent decades, the trend in fashion magazines has been precisely the opposite: many elements per page, shaped boxes…” (Eugenia de la Torriente).
This work of design and art direction is not only aware of the historical part but also of the complex moment in which the big publishing houses are living, adapted to a digital reality where they coexist with new visual proposals.
The tour ends with an extensive review of the Vogue covers of the last four years that, in an organic way, shows a definite evolution and a clear direction of the commitment to iconic covers, based on the image and memorable for the audience.
Views of Óscar Germade’s exhibition at the agora in Elisava
MUTUO
Méndez Núñez, 7
08003 Barcelona
Population
The world’s population faced a tremendous change with the industrial revolution: until 1800 it had taken all of human existence for the world population to reach one million. The second billion was reached in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the 4th billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion only 13 years (1987). This means that during the 20th century alone, the population has grown from 1.6 billion, to 6 billion. And only 50 years ago, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
Our world is made by people. People living in territories. Each human is important and should be equal. Still, we tend to define ourselves, our values and our views by a short sighted perspective, narrowed to our own national context. The world’s flag is a slap in the face of reality. The world itself is this flag, complex and not western at all. Is the reality of the world adapted to its symbolic representation?
Passport Index
In 1920 after WW1, the League of Nations met in France for a meeting that would shape modern travel. Easing border crossings by train was a priority, but the lack of a standardized passport design posed a serious obstacle to the resumption of normal intercourse and to the economic recovery of the world. During the meeting the member came to an agreement on a specified size, layout, and design of travel documents for 42 nations.
Since that moment every “sovereign” nation has designed and created its own Passport.
The passport index shows how powerful your passport can be depending where you’re from. The more visa free countries you can enter, the more powerful your passport is. The passport has become a power representation .
These globes represent how different the free movement can seem depending on where you’re from. While there are countries that may perceive their world as an open and unlimited space, there are others that perceive their available world as just an archipelago of 26 islands.
How open is the world to you?
Passport prices
To have a passport represents a time and economic investment. This investment differs from country to country and if you consider local wages, the process of actually owning a first document required to travel can be a real luxury for certain nationalities.
We are aware that freedom comes at a cost – But can we put a price on it? Passport prices reveal how volatile and valuable freedom and mobility has become in our globalized world. Where do these prices come from? – Are these prices imposed by external factors?
Passport fees should be related to the average income of its citizens, and usually passport offices charge between 2% and 4% for a passport compared to the average income. But there’s cases where the price can be as high as 12%. Passports are a big business. The global e–passport market is valued at 24 billion dollars.
People need passports, but at what cost?
Golden visas – Refugee journey
Golden Visas are programs in which you can pay for citizenships and passports. They are designed to attract money and businesses to countries. 22 countries from all over the world offer these types of programs. Should any passport have a price tag? What’s the real price of your passport? Should millionaires have the right to buy nationalities?
In Portugal, around €2.7 billion has been invested in the country through the golden visa scheme, €2.4 billion of this through the purchase of real estate. In Marvila (Lisbon), more than 600 residents had to move elsewhere after home prices rose 88% in two years.
But while some people can buy nationalities and be welcome in any place, others must leave their own country because of poverty, political unrest or other serious circumstances that exist there. And here comes even a lexicon misconception, why do we call the first ones expats, and the second immigrants?