ESA Saint-Luc
1st october > 1st november 2015
RECIPROCITY design Liège 2015
curators:
Teresa Sdralevich
Nawal Bakouri
guest designers:
Homa Delvaray (IR)
Tom Henni (FR)
Malte Martin (DE/FR)
scenography and graphic design:
Nawal Bakouri
Costanza Matteucci
school and teachers:
Philippe Landrain
Daniel Renzoni
Marie Sion (visual and graphic communication)
Véronique Gengler (silkscreen printing)
XXL printing:
PMR, Brussels
furniture manufacturing and technical coordination:
Luigi Baldassi – Province de Liège / Culture
thanks to:
Anne-Marie Wynants – Director ESA Saint-Luc
Michel Servais – Co-director
the technical staff of ESA Saint-Luc
Benjamin Pailhe and the RElab team
The relationship between graphic design and the common good,
and specifically between graphic design and the public debate,
runs through the whole history of visual communication –
especially in the shape of public interest design.
Forms of commitment are been deeply changed by those who
think that graphic design should produce symbols accordingly
to the current needs of society, from an economic, political
and social point of view. For the graphic designer, the question
regarding the responsibility for the images he shows to the
public, and thus regarding his work, should not be taken lightly.
The people’s relationship to images has significantly changed,
on one hand in terms of reception – the images themselves
being widely broadcasted through extensive networks –
on the other hand in terms of the tools used to create those
images, which have become increasingly available for everyone.
Graphic design can be an instrument for social and citizen
empowerment, because it enables a dialogue, both verbal
and visual and because it shapes content with an open-minded
attitude.
The three guest graphic designers for RECIPROCITY design
Liège 2015 have a unique relationship to words and public
statements; both recurring themes in their work. They share
the art of staging or shaping words, sometimes both.
They are also image-makers and give the onlookers the means
to project themselves into a sphere of emancipatory thinking.
Printed Commons, Graphic Activisms is a three-part event:
three workshops are respectively led by Homa Delvaray,
Tom Henni and Malte Martin; an exhibition at the B9 building
featuring the works of the participants as well as previous
works from the international guest designers; and posters
designed by Teresa Sdralevich for the triennial, which will be
displayed all over town before and during the month-long event.
Tom Henni is in love with words and with the spoken word, and is also
a collector: his uniqueness resides in his ability to dissect design as
a mechanic would dissect an engine – he becomes then the astute
director who, through this process, re-proposes and re-composes
different ways of reclaiming the meaning back, either letting other
actors in, either not.
His workshop Machine / Le truc (that sounds like “Thing /
Thingummy”) proposes to common citizens to take the floor and
enjoy designing their own message – Tom Henni loves printing,
but he didn’t bring anything to print with: the printer, it’s you!
With the help of a number of combinatorial designs that he created,
the graphic designer gives you the chance to draw your own big size
poster, and convey your message to the city. “Thing /Thingummy”,
“Save the World” or simply “Love Love”, people attending this
workshop made up of lines, words and pictures will be able to work
on different notes, ranging from poetic to political, with humour
and commitment.
Tom Henni was born in 1980 in Marseille, he works and lives in
the Drôme.
He is interested in books, fonts, texts, comics, printing techniques,
arts and crafts, in the gesture, the expression of cultures, the image,
language…
Henni draws as he would do push-ups, works with all possible tools,
from the most rigorous editorial type-design and freehand drawing,
from a post-it to a poster, from a book to the public space, from
a rough to educational software, from natural to artificial, from
intuitive to calculated.
Tom Henni
Poetry/Night, 2009,
Caen, France
For this project, the collaboration
with the team of volunteers and
Eric Vautrin, the festival director,
has been very important. It made
possible to name a shared vision of poetry and to answer
the question: how the printed matters could become poems
themselves? They should resonate in the city. So Tom Henni
played with injunctions, invitations and echoes of both the
reading context and the form. The object itself is an invitation
to (com-)pose and (dis-)pose the event’s program. It’s a hint
to the designer’s work who must also come to terms with
a given material.
Tom Henni
(To open up) the most beautiful
books, 2009, Chaumont, France
The scenography of this exhibition
is a very peculiar answer to
a commission. How to display
books is a perennial question.
The peculiarity resides in the way
the designer chose to re-enact the
dissection process of the book. He studies the interior with
his professional eye and, by cutting the books out, he translates
physically his vision so that anyone can feel it and share it.
It’s a risky bet that turns into a performance and requires
blind trust on behalf of the client.
Tom Henni
2012, Oullins, France
La tribuT du verbe (literally The Verb
Tribe) is a poetry slam company
organising creative writing
workshops for young audiences.
In order to render a session that took
place as part of the “Poets’ Spring”
(Dis-moi dix mots, Tell me ten words),
T.H. proposes a design solution based
on the identity he created for the
company. By using the font “Totem
caméo” (LongType Foundry), through a graphical and rythmical
game, he stages a number of texts that were created to
be performed by their young authors. The fact that their work
is re-interpreted by a graphic designer gives them the chance
to focus on its qualities with fresh eyes.
Tom Henni
2013, Writings off the Walls,
Vaulx-en-Velin, France
EHLM is a cultural project on writing
and languages. The challenge is
to communicate over a project that
is open to everyone. T.H. created
a main poster and a few smaller
ones, each one being printed on
the leftover paper of the previous
one. The economy of means is due
to the small production budget;
the itemization of different models of exercise books on the
background becomes a grid that blend with the pictures
of the city brick walls.
Tom Henni
2009, Skizzenfestival live
catalogue, Srtalsund, Germany
This festival is the first international
event dedicated to sketches. Henni
created one booklet of the catalogue
a day during the festival. Again,
it’s a performance playing with
Henni’s spontaneous side that’s
to be found in his drawings, his
analytic and (de-)constructive approach. Except for the editorial
booklet and the cover slip, the catalogue is made exclusively
with a Riso machine and a scanner.
Tom Henni
2011, Guide of the young
festival-goer, Chaumont,
France
T.H. is at the same time editor in
chief and graphic designer of this
guide aimed at children aged 7 to
11. His sense of analysis pushes him
to dissect the festival’s exhibitions,
allowing children to test themselves,
for instance on the graphic design of
Olivetti, the typing machines industry.
Except for a few mandatory captions,
all texts and pictures are hand-drawn. Here again the standard
exercise books’ formats come as composition grid.
Tom Henni
2011, Fotokino Drawing Book,
Marseille, France
On the occasion of his sister’s
Bettina exhibition, Particules
élémentaires (Elementary particles) ,
T.H. conceived a workshop that gave
children the chance of drawing
with the artists’ vocabulary by
transforming it in rubber stamps that would be printed over a
grid imitating the lines of a typical French exercise book, called
Séyès. Stories are told through forms instead of being written
with words. The friction between written and visual language
typical of Bettina Henni’s work can be experimented by
the workshop participants.
Tom Henni
2010 to 2014, Lyon, France
T.H. designs since 2010 the posters
of Spontaneous, an improvisation festival.
The idea is to get to the root of the project,
that is to say to use the posters as
an improvisation area – or at least a zone
of spontaneity. The first year Henni
has hand-drawn the 100 posters on poster
paper where only the logos were offset printed. In 2011, he works
on a less minimalist grid, the text and the logos being printed with
a fluo green halo so as to set a frame for a hand-drawn improvisation.
The blank posters work individually.
In the first phase, T.H. invites 10 illustrators and graphic designers
to come and draw the posters on the spot, afterwards people from
Lyon and festival-goers take hold of them, trying to achieve the goal
of 3000 posters.
For the 2012 edition, he prints a naked man walking fast on the
background. The man is a comedian and the Festival director who throws
himself in, all naked, at the beginnning of the improvisation session.
Then Henni fills up 100 posters alone but, 50 spots becoming available
at the last minute, he invites the THTF duo for a 6-hands improvisation.
Finally in 2013 he asks internet users to have their portraits taken
online; the pictures validated by himself and the client will be printed
on the posters. The concept is developed every year more or less crazily
so as to let professionals and festival-lovers freely improvise and
be part of the project.
Tom Henni
Mam’s activity books,
Saint-Étienne, France
The project consists in illustrating
and page designing an exhibition
guide for young audiences.
The activities that are directed
to them are also a way of giving
explanations about the works to
the parents, through the children.
The first one (monumental) had been
designed by Saint Etienne’s Modern
Art Museum staff. The medium
had been imagined by default
by the printer and the client.
For the second one (fluxus) T.H.
has been collaborating with
Papier Machine, micro-risograph-printer, playing with
unbound sheets that reminded some productions of the Fluxus
members, who often worked with an economy of means.
Tom Henni
Monster Atlas, since 2012
The “Atlas Monstre” is a research
object at the intersection between
theory and practice.
It’s simultaneously a system
of maps, grids and formats allowing
to imagine different models
of pre-structured layouts. Thanks
to the way the previously printed
paper is folded and cut, various kinds of books or booklets can
be invented. “Atlas Monstre” had been initially developed for
Fotokino in the framework of Marseille Provence 2012
but was dropped for organizational reasons; it was supposed
to encourage the dialogue with the guests all season long
in order to produce a piece of pedagogical documentation.
Neglected, it is now an object that is about to find – or is in
search of – its possible applications but, because of its form,
actually speaks about the graphic designer’s work. It responds
on one hand to the books’ dissection that T.H. staged for
“(ouvrir) les plus beaux livres”, on the other hand to the various
ways of inventing media as in projects like the sketch books
or “Écriture Hors Les Murs”.
Malte Martin loves to dive into the city and to get its vibe, he loves to
make the walls speak poetry, to let them tell something intimate and
public. He has a unique way of responding to the world with “open”
words, words that are offered in a way. Working along with colleagues,
viewers, clients, he looks for the climax point in order to design forms
that question the senses and the consciences.
Malte Martin observes constantly his visual, political and social
environment. His projects are driven by this strive and it’s this same
strive that he tries to convey by creating forms that are alternatively
direct and colorful, or delicate and low-key. It’s the emergency exit
from an environment that shows little respect for those who live in it,
those who are permanently bombarded with commercial messages
and prescriptions.
What’s the use of design? The workshop he conceived for this
triennial 2015, will question the students over the stereotypes
surrounding the notion of design; Martin urges them to investigate
the range of social and cultural innovation approaches. The studentsresearchers will create typo/graphical black and white posters to
feed a large-size wall newspaper that will hang in the B9 building
and on the Saint-Etienne square; on this spot (in front of the Meeting
Point) a Morris column will be placed for the occasion – a means
of questioning visitors and passers-by over what we usually call
“design”.
Malte Martin Studio is composed by Malte Martin Vassilis Kalokyris,
Adeline Goyet (until 2015) and Cédric Andrzejczak.
Malte Martin was born in Berlin in 1958, he works and lives in Paris.
He starts off his education by studying at the Kunstakademie
Stuttgart, a school in the Bauhaus tradition, afterwards he attends
the Fine Arts Academy in Paris and joins the Grapus collective.
Martin’s graphic design studio work ranges over all fields of
contemporary creation – theater, dance, music, exhibitions –
and investigates the stakes of design in the urban space.
Alongside, with Agrafmobile, Malte Martin has created a place for
experimentation in both visual and sound creation, midway between
the gesture and the sign. It’s a laboratory that nourishes also his
commissions. “Through this visual theater I want to re-create a public
space that shows an alternative to bureaucratic and mercantile
messages. It’s an attempt to reclaim the public space as a place
for imagination that belongs to those who are living in it.”
Malte Martin Studio is composed by Malte Martin Vassilis Kalokyris,
Adeline Goyet (until 2015) and Cédric Andrzejczak.
Malte Martin
2014, Les Mureaux, France
The "Pôle Molière" is a concentration
of public services in a neighbourood
undergoing full renovation:
kindergarten, nursery and primary
school, multifunctional facilities,
restaurant, bar…The 1% bill of
specification (percentage devoted
to an artistic intervention, n.t.), demanded a signage system
that would be the embodiment of the whole hub.
M.M.’s proposal is a vocabulary of simple forms – round, circle,
triangle, diamond – where every building has its own colour
and form. It’s easily understandable, easy to stick to, and cannot
be overlooked. Nontheless the vocabulary is not conceived
as an object or some furniture that is added afterwards, but
echoes the architectural gesture and it interacts with it. These
forms fit closely to the walls, the windows, the hub’s floor…
so as to unfold a plastic composition in the space. In art it’s
the universal vocabulary of modern utopias. During the building
works M.M. has organized several workshops with inhabitants
so as to make easier the appropriation of the new buildings’
signage; he also designed a game, Modulo, intended for
the hub’s teachers and children.
Malte Martin
Public Words, 2007-2009,
Paris 20 th, France
This project, created in the Saint
Blaise Street in Paris, begins in 2007
and finishes at the end of 2009.
Three years long, M.M. publishes
on the monumental surface of
a building, every week, in a single
sentence, his perception
of the neighbourood. That obviously arouses the reactions
and comments of the inhabitants… The various “answers”,
printed on cards, are posted the following week, forming
an ensemble of identities/declaration of the island. The year
ends with a strong moment, in 2008 the words are screened
over all the facades of the Cardeurs square.
During three years M.M. renews his graphic vocabulary in order
to tell the life of the inhabitants from the inside. This project
accompanies a slow process of reconstruction and restoration,
during which for instance the city library is displaced.
Malte Martin
Boulevard Magenta Saga,
2006, Paris 9 th and 10 th, France
This project is Malte Martin’s
answer to the invitation made by the
City of Paris in order to celebrate
the transformation of the main
circulation axes of the French
capital city into one accessible
not only to cars but to pedestrians,
bycicles and public transportation.
M. M. imagines a dynamic
intervention, a work that would gather the public speech.
He mixes up three different kinds of typographic posters: some
texts by the city’s philosophers, some questions signed M.M.
and texts dictated by the inhabitants and passers-by. Only part
of the posters is replaced every week in order to guarantee
a balance between words around the public debate and
the poetical side of the project.
Agrafmobile Malte Martin and Costanza Matteucci
From the Letter to the Picture,
2012, Paris, France
The letter is the subject matter
of this interactive exhibition which
allows children – and their family
members – to look at these symbols
differently, poetically, to explore
their expressive potential at the very
moment when they are learning to
read and write. The exhibition, that
took place in the Pompidou Centre,
curated by Marie Claude Beck and
Christine Herpe-Mora, is also
an occasion to recall the links between the letter and various
contemporary artistic outputs.
As in a warehouse, a number of boxes, clothed in black
and white signs, are stacked up, piled up, stocked…
in the graphic scenography designed by Malte Martin
and Costanza Matteucci.
Malte Martin
since 2005, Paris, France
Assisted by Adeline Goyet
The Athénée theater posters should
be read as a saga hanging on the
walls of Paris’ underground. It’s a
sequence of sentences extracted
from literary works that scream out
in the street what theater actually is:
dramatized words dialoguing with current events, with people’s
everyday life. Je ne pense qu’à ça, l’argent (I always think about
it, money) echoes the "bling" period of the former French
president; Chaque voix compte (Every ballot counts), relates
to the presidential elections that followed in France.
With the Athénée, if you don’t go to the theater, the theater
comes and tickles you in the street. The black and white
resound in a city saturated with poor colorful letters; the
posters are the result of the studies carried out by M.M.
in order to put into practice – as he says himself – a
"low-tension" strategy, to avoid screaming louder,
to avoid adding more noise to the existing noise.
Malte Martin with Vassilis Kalokyris
2015
The Superpo app enables people
to try out on their own all possible
combinations of the font created by
M.M. for the Théatre 71 in Malakoff
since 2014. The font adapts itself
at the atmosphere of programmed
dramatizations. M. decides to
develop a free app, so that the public
might use the font in a playful way
and get possession of the theater’s
visual identity.
Malte Martin
2014-15, Tours, France
With the assistance of
Vassilis Kalokyris
In mutual agreement with the
new director of the Olympia Theater
in Tours, M.M. has conceived a
new name: T°. The visual identity
looks like the vernacular yard sale
or gig posters. The purpose was
to break with the dusty and elitist
image of the old theater, the T°
cries out in the street as it was to announce a catch wrestling
fight. Even in this vernacular style, M.M. plays with literature
and with typographic structures at various scales
Malte Martin
Multiplicity, 2007, Paris, France
For the opening of the Cité Nationale
de l’Histoire de l’Immigration
(National Estate on the History
of Immigration) in Paris, the Director,
of the “Cité Estate network”,
Agnès Arquez Roth, asked M.M. to
help display its resources and its
groundwork. Multiplicité is designed
as a theater of words, it investigates the representations of
immigration in our collective imagination. Its textual resources
are to be found in the collective heritage and in the network’s
archives.
The project aims also to make the estate network a place
of permanent research, a place where the word “agora”
would still have a meaning.
Malte Martin
2010-2013, Montpellier, France
To streak the city. Twice a year,
the city of Marseille crowns a
neighbourood “ Artistic Temporary
Zone ” (whose acronym is ZAT
in French). A number of artists work
in the urban space with original,
off-the-wall and colourful projects.
Under the artistic direction of
Pascal Lebrun-Cordier, ZAT experiments with a new format
that bypasses the big festivals heavy machinery and allows
wandering over the area. M.M., as associated artist, wished
to avoid confining the visual communication to the usual media,
posters-program-web; instead, he took the challenge
to « stripe » the city. The logo is modular and is redesigned
for each ZAT with its own colours, its shape, its striping.
The same logic is applied as a scenographic element to streak
the urban space. And become the property of ordinary people,
shopkeepers, social workers… turning into a tool
of participation.
Malte Martin
Galaxy of Movements, 2011,
Bobigny, France
“ Everybody produces signs.
The city is a jungle full of signs.
How to live in the jungle and send
messages to other people ? How to
build new landscapes of symbols ?
These are some of the issues I would
like to study in the framework of this
project. First, I would like to take possession of the space that
I will dispose of in the school. And transform it on a permanent
basis. Turn my studio into a topo-graphic landscape and meet
the pupils in this ever-changing environment. Invite them in.
(…) ”. That’s how M.M. explains the laboratory that he set up
during his residence in Bobigny in 2011.
During the whole year spent amidst the pupils, he creates
the drawing “ Galaxie des mouvements ” that is painted
on the floor of the Auguste Delaune’s junior school courtyard
and customize a usually ordinary place.
Malte Martin
To be here, 2012-2015,
Ris Orangis, Grigny, France
This action, led by the PEROU
association, began with the
construction, in december 2012,
of a hut like a seaman’s chapel,
a collective room at the center of the
Romani shanty town in Ris Orangis. “To build in order to get out
of the slum”, that’s how architects, designers and sociologists
are invited to work instead of having the public authorities
destroy on the pretext of insalubrity. In the first place for M.M.
it was important to give voice to the evidence of this aspiration:
“To be here, to live now”. After the destruction of the shanty
town in April 2013, the artists begin to build again (particularly
in Grigny), and M.M. steps in again by placing drawings
on the ground, deriving like the waves that water makes from
a geolocalization point, mixing poetry with the aknowledgement
of being still here. Then the points coming with the text
“Elsewhere begins here” or “Here begins elsewhere” in
a neverending round dance are written on the newly built huts.
In 2015 M.M. carries on with the project designing the
PEROU’s research report.
Malte Martin
National Drama Centre of
Béthune, 2014-2015, Béthune,
France
Cécile Backès, the Director of the
“Comédie de Béthune”, has chosen
“sharing the theater” as leimotiv.
In order to materialize this premise,
this simple idea came to mind:
the audience, the inhabitants,
the anonymous… could be
the ambassadors of the shows on
the communication material through
the popular gesture of sharing, the pictures, the selfies.
The set up procedure is very simple: to perform the idea
of welcoming an artist, of offering a show, with your hands
and face.
Homa Delvaray creates in her posters a series of visual plays where
typography becomes the main character. She is iranian and therefore
the heiress to a tradition of ornamental writing, and to an extremely
decorative visual landscape; an environment that literally projects
the viewers into the message. She works every single poster as
a unique piece that can really turn people’s visual taste upside
down. She aims to shift the attention to issues she cares for, and
to art pieces that are often vehicles of a subtle form of protest. By
paying close attention to contemporary Tehran’s social and cultural
environment, Homa Delvaray gives an added value to the visual
makers’ practice and underlines the importance of their messages
both in the Iranian context and on the cultural iranian scene
presented abroad.
Re-think and Re-create, Delvaray’s workshop for Printed Commons,
questions the recycling economy, by transforming tangible or
abstract elements, and by using the leftovers of everyone’s
environment in order to express a unique message and (re-)shape
the image. Every participant, in his/her role of citizen-artist, is invited
to understand the recycling process from his/her point of view, and to
create a poster that is the mirror of this vision. The topic investigates
the old and the contemporary, the past and the newly made, what’s
useful and what’s useless, and ultimately the very role of the
designer.
The posters will be printed in silkscreen, a technique which Delvaray
is particularly fond of.
Homa Delvaray, a graphic designer and visual artist, was born
in Tehran in 1980, where she lives. She has received a B.A. degree
in Visual Communication from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran
University (2006) and works since then a freelance graphic designer.
She has developed her vocational activity to art direction of events,
design research, given speeches on her own works, attending
festivals as jury member, setting up graphic design workshops
in different Iranian cities and abroad.
Homa Delvaray
2013-2014, Tehran, Iran
Tehran Monoxide is an artistic, sociocultural
and environmental project founded
by Negar Farajiani (a curator, painter
and graphic designer) focusing on children
and the capital city’s air pollution and
addressing the interaction between a city
and its citizens and the concept of an urban
dweller’s rights.
H.D. has received an assignement as
the art director and graphic designer twice
for this project with the same subject
but two different approaches.
The first project was launched in 2011 on the Universal Children’s Day
in collaboration with 36 artists presenting their works in a school.
The artists had to be fathers or mothers since they were all dealing with
the pollution issue and were concerned about their children’s health.
The second project consisted of photographs that were taken in the
city by children aged 4 to 18.
In the spring of 2015, a third edition of Tehran monoxide project, “ LaleZar
Garden ”, was created by H.D. and Negar Farajiani. This collaborative
project draws attention to Tehran’s regional trees. Their botanical names
have been spray painted on 19 Iranian-made car exhausts, and formed
an installation in Negarestan Garden, to remind of old gardens that today
have been transformed into public transport locations. Homa Delvaray
2012, Berlin, Germany
“ Right-To-Left ” project; Arabic
and Iranian Visual Cultures
In the fall of 2012 an event about
Iranian and Arabic visual culture
with the title “ Right-To-Left ” took
place in Berlin. The event was
curated by Sascha Thoma and Ben
Wittner (Eps51). In addition to the
main exhibition, a group of designers
were asked to create two series of
billboards to be shown in nine Berlin
underground stations.
Homa Delvaray
2014, Tehran, Iran
Cultural project about Recycling.
2008, Iran
Environment Poster for the exhibition Innovation
and progress in urban management.
Homa Delvaray
2011, Berlin, Germany
Group exhibition
2011, Los Angeles, Usa
Poster made in collaboration with Ogilvy et Mather.
Homa Delvaray
2012, Tehran, Iran
Group Painting Exhibition.
2011, Tehran, Iran
Group painting exhibition of 13 International Artists.
Homa Delvaray
2012, Tehran, Iran
Farhad Gavzan Exhibition poster.
2011, Tehran, Iran
Group Exhibition.
Homa Delvaray
2013, Tehran, Iran
Poster for a exhibition of Emerging
Iranian Artists.