Take a Din A4 sheet of 100 grams and fold it in half. Exactly in half. Ensure the two little corners are perfectly aligned, as are the other two corners. Like this. Perfect. Leave it on one side of the table and pick up another sheet. This one weighs 120 grams instead of 100. Do the same: corner to corner, zap! Now you have a second perfect diptych in front of you. Now close your eyes. Explore both diptychs with your hands until you understand what it means to have a 20-gram difference. Unfold them, fold them again, rub them, make them sound, and smell them if you need to. Notice every detail. What? Can you feel how different they are? Do you now understand why the world needs both of them, not just one or the other?
Last year, I attended a seminar titled Landscape and Photographic Narratives at the Bloom School, led by curator and Art History PhD Marta Dahó. The group was quite diverse, and among the attendees was Laura Van Severen, a Belgian photographer based in Barcelona. Months after the seminar ended, she contacted me to design a booklet for a collective exhibition.
After all, who cares about these possibilities when, outside this studio-bubble, so many people are fighting to survive? Am I the only one who sometimes feels that our work is anything but essential?
The piece we’ve created consists of two Din A4 sheets folded in half at different intervals which, placed one inside the other, form a perfect four-tiered staircase, with the printed text of each page sticking out. Viewed vertically, it could resemble a phone directory; viewed horizontally, a mountain horizon. Well, at least that’s what we both like to imagine.
Where am I going with all this? Here it is. I have a total of sixteen printed versions of the booklet on my desk, each showing differences in text size, space composition, information layout, line spacing, image dimensions, and paper thickness. Seemingly tiny variations that, in the eyes of this burning world we live in, might appear to be absolutely trivial concerns. After all, who cares about these possibilities when, outside this studio-bubble, so many people are fighting to survive? Am I the only one who sometimes feels that our work is anything but essential? Can graphic design save us from anything?
On Thursday, Laura sent me an email with the latest changes and it floored me—not literally, but metaphorically. She ended by saying, ‘This weekend, I’ll try folding 100 and 120-gram paper to make my final decision,’ and in that moment, it felt like a slap in the face. Because, after all, isn’t this attention, care, and meticulousness for the things we care about the only form of survival we have left?
Hugs from the H6 bus,
Ingrid
