n°41 — Manuel Raeder. Author: Kiki Mazzucchelli

Studio Manuel Raeder is an interdisciplinary design studio based in Berlin since 2003. Its activities include a wide range of formats, exploring the boundaries between exhibitions, ephemera, books, type design, editing and publishing to furniture design, as well as display. Studio Manuel Raeder is concerned with the construction of narratives, both in the form of books, exhibition and communication design. Books can be used as carriers of information, or experimental devices to document or conceive narratives. In a similar manner, exhibition design can trigger different sensorial experiences, thus leading the visitor through a spatial narrative. The studio is interested in the meaning of books within space, the archive and also the future of libraries. This issue of Revue Faire focuses on how Studio Manuel Reader’s work unfolds from the book page to spatial experience. Selected projects will be shown alongside historical works dealing with ideas of exhibition display and architecture by architects and designers such as Lina Bo Bardi, Rogério Duarte, and Carlo Scarpa, whose ground-breaking approach to spatial experience have informed Studio Manuel Reader’s practice.

n°24 — A theater identity: The Schauspielhaus Zürich by Cornel Windlin. Authors: Étienne Hervy and Thierry Chancogne

Authors: Étienne Hervy and Thierry Chancogne
36 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
23th September 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

Designed by Cornel Windlin (with Gregor Huber), the communications of the Zürich Schauspielhaus for the 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons appeared just as the collaboration between the designers and the theater ended: with the Grand Prix of the Brno Biennial in 2010, where they won first prize in the international competition, with an exhibition in Chaumont the following year at the same time as the Swiss Federal Design Award, a brief appearance in specialist magazines and on specialist sites, and then nothing at all. Once again, Cornel Windlin retreated into the shadows, leaving behind work which asserted itself through both its amplitude and completeness in the heavy silence which remained, and through the multifaceted mass of the media imagery that it reactivated. A series of seasonal posters, event posters, annual and monthly programs, booklets dedicated to each piece, invitations, flyers, graphic materials from the program for younger audiences… everything is here, set in a precisely tuned bold Unica77, digitized by the Lineto foundry with the original team of designers (along with Windlin), all coming together in that blindness inherent to times of eclipse, where the black disk chosen by Windlin as the identity of the Schauspielhaus stands out. Now, a decade later, the idea is to propose a meticulously organized reception, informed by Cornel Widlin and placed in a cavalier perspective by the analysis of Thierry Chancogne.

n°02 — A technical platform: Colorlibrary.ch by Maximage. Author: Manon Bruet

Author: Manon Bruet.
8th November 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

The Workflow research project, run by Tatiana Rhis, Guy Meldem, and Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee (Maximage) at the Écal, is interested in current technologies of the printed object. It consists of a series of experiences that attempt to circumvent currently available production technologies, provoking coincidences and accidents with the goal of obtaining new outcomes.

More than simply questioning the possible circumvention of tools, Workflow explores technicality, modes of functioning, and flaws. In this way, the programme pursues the field of experimentation opened up by the Swiss studio Maximage since 2008. In the context of their degree project at the Écal, Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee already combined manual and digital techniques so as to develop their own production tools, and notably their own printing methods. From their experiments have emerged, among other things, the Programme typeface, and the Les impressions magiques publication, that appears today as a manifest object of their approach.

One of the first results of the Workflow programme has been the creation of a series of colorimetric profiles that allows the conversion of digital images for printing with one, two, three, four, or five accompanying colors, whether they are basic (CMYK), pastels, fluorescent, or metallic.

The work on these profiles has two aims. It serves to increase the awareness of students at the Écal with regard to the management and theory of color, but it also allows, for the first time, the automation of operations and settings that have until now been done on a case-by-case basis through the manual use of image-editing software and CAD.

Advocating an “innovative” and “professional” solution for the treatment of color, the Écal and the Workflow programme launched the website colorlibrary.ch in 2016 and offered the profiles for sale. The platform appears as an online library that presents a large variety of profiles with different colorful combinations. The different profiles are displayed on screen, applied to images by Iranian photographer Shirana Shahbazi; they seem to replay the codes of Photoshop type images–from the butterfly to the eye, the still life to the waterfall.

Beginning with an analysis of the structure of this platform, the aesthetic and terminological languages that it summons, and their limits, we will open a number of fields of investigation, more widely linked to the question of the tools and modes of production of images.

n°04 — A communication: invitation cards by the artist Stanley Brouwn. Author: Céline Chazalviel

n°04 — A communication: invitation cards by the artist Stanley Brouwn.
Author: Céline Chazalviel.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
6th December 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

If we could attribute to Stanley Brouwn a desire to dissociate his artistic production from who he is and to reveal otherness through the mastery of his image and that of his work, we could also divine an intention to focus the public’s attention on his exhibitions. Behind the standards put in place for the communication related to his exhibitions—the use of lowercase and Helvetica exclusively, the refusal to reproduce images of his work, to produce (or allow production of) written commentary on the subject of the same work, to appear in the context of a vernissage or even to answer an interview—the artist builds his identity by way of ellipses. Since his participation in documenta 5 (1972), the stories linked to this attitude have come to draw the outlines of an artistic posture that goes beyond any one particular case. The invitation cards for his solo exhibitions provide a symptomatic example: set almost exclusively in Helvetica, the absence of uppercase, flying in the face of the graphic identity of the gallery or the host institution, they seem impossible to date, give or take twenty years.

This mastery reveals that graphic and typographic choices represent one of the spaces of neutrality built by Brouwn, like other artists and theoreticians of his generation, and generations that came after. According to one of the positions of Sol Lewitt, “conceptual artists are more mystical than rationalist,” and the case of Brouwn gives weight to this idea. Whether it be by way of a mediation adopted by the artist himself and the relationship with the institution that it entails, that of the myth of the autonomy of the artwork, of the relationship with documentation, with commentary and the analysis of an artwork or even the conditions of reception, Brouwn escapes the category of the conceptual artist and incites us to measure the contemporary echoes of his radicality.