n°19 — A history: graphic designer-publishers. Author: Thierry Chancogne

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Author: Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
5th February 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062

In 1275, the kingdom of France ruled on the rights of stationarii (copyists) and librarii (librairies, the French for “bookshop”), newly emancipated from the yoke of the Church (Friedrich Karl von Savigny (author and publisher), Histoire du droit romain au moyen âge, Tome III, Charles Hingray, Paris, 1839 (1815), p. 415). The main question was and has always been, even before the invention of printing, the regulation of the circulation of writing, and the designation of those responsible for their inscription and distribution.

Robin Kinross identified the emergence of the modern figure of the typographer in the 17^th century, with The doctrine of handy-works: applied to the art of printing by Joseph Moxon (Robin Kinross, Modern typography: An Essay in Critical History, Hyphen Press, London, 2004 (1992) pp. 15-16). But long before this, graphic artists, copyists, and typographers such as Geoffroy Tory and Henri Estienne the elder were both booksellers and publishers who gave much thought to their practice and the contents that they released into the public space.
It would seem that the time has come to reassess this ancient tradition, with more and more graphic artists and designers choosing to establish their own publishing houses in order to defend their editorial approach in both senses of the word—that of “editing” and the choice and organization of graphic material, but also in the sense of “publishing”, applying a certain ethic to the distribution and advertising of the contents.

n°07 — A book: Parallel Encyclopedia, Batia Suter. Author: Jérôme Dupeyrat

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Author: Jérôme Dupeyrat.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
24 January 2018
ISBN: 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN: 2558-2062

Since the end of the 1990s, Batia Suter has been collecting books—second hand for the most part—that she acquires for their iconography, in such a way as to build up an image database that sits on the shelves of her personal library. All of this has become the basic material for an artwork that consists of presenting the images according to a logic of visual editing, providing them with new modalities of appearance and thus new possibilities of interpretation.

Parallel Encyclopedia is, at the time of writing, the artist’s most significant work. Ongoing since 2004, it has taken the form of a number of installations and two imposing publications from Roma Publications published in 2007 and 2016. Each version of the project is characterized by the association of hundreds of heteroclite images (historical, artistic, scientific, and technical), grouped according to typological and formal links. From one system to another, the conditions of presentation of these images taken from books are renewed: the sequencing and seriality of bound pages; constellations or, on the contrary, linear sequences of images reproduced and exhibited on wall panels; constellations or linear sequences of book pages opened and placed on flat mounts. Though the exhibited images are the same, these various exhibition possibilities determine differential readings.

Beyond the fascination that such a project can generate, this text will attempt to seize all of its complexity. To do this, Batia Suter’s work will be re-situated within the context of a history of iconographic practices that run through different fields of activities and knowledge. We will also focus on the trajectory of the images gathered in Parallel Encyclopedia and the effects of the process of remediation to which they are subjected. Ultimately, it will be a question of drawing a figure of the artist as an “editor” and of studying both the function of Graphic Design in the artist’s work and the place that we can attribute to the artist in the field of Graphic Design, a field to which Batia Suter doesn’t directly belong, but one that runs through her productions, and to which she was confronted in a concrete fashion in the context of her collaboration with the Graphic Designer Roger Willems in the design of the two volumes of the encyclopedia that, in fact, is today a reference for many artists, as much as it is for a large number of Graphic Designers.

n°23 — Jan Tschichold: The Master approving of his own work. Author: Žiga Testen

Author: Žiga Testen
24 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
9 September 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

Design history as an independent discipline and field of study appears to be in trouble. Design historians complain about its diminishing influence within universities due to the ongoing instrumentalisation of higher education. The Eurocentric canon built upon values and methods adopted from art and architecture history has been contested by decolonial theories. And finally, it appears that the trust in the institution of ‘history’ itself and its meta-narratives has eroded.

A discipline that was once considered to provide reflection on what came before and guidance on what could come to be—under the auspice of a grand narrative of continuous progress—has been replaced by modest narratives, social anthropologies, and claims of the ‘end of history’.

In this article, I rummage through the ruins of design history and try to unpack what it was that we once considered design history and our design history canon, how we wrote about it and to what end. In particular, I focus on this one image: a portrait photograph of a well-known historical figure, the designer and typographer Jan Tschichold. How is it used? And what stories do we tell about it?

n°08 — A residency: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé at Villa Medici. Author: Thierry Chancogne

Interview with Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé by Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm,
+ 1 A2 poster, black and white (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
07 February 2018
ISBN : 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN : 2558-2096

Typo-topographic records

While still a student in the Ésad Valence, Coline Sunier, along with Grégory Ambos, created a striking front cover for the booklet associated with the Zak Kyes programme, Forms of Inquiry, using a series of jewels sampled from the more or less heraldic graphic patrimony of highly local emblems.

When she founded her studio with Charles Mazé, the duo continued the work of collection, which is at the same time one of the etymologies of reading, and one of the characteristics of the conceptual aesthetic of the list that emerged in the 1970s—first, in the re-casting of the Ésad Valence’s identity in 2012-2013; then in the work created during a residency at the Villa Médicis, Come vanno le cose?, dedicated to records of 1,512 graffiti found on the walls of Rome illustrating the portrait of a mysterious survivor, perhaps imagined, of the Red Brigades; and more recently in the identity developed for the Centre d’art contemporain in Brittany.

The collection of signs of power and the traces of resistance profoundly inscribed in the always political matter of the spaces is often accompanied by an attempt at typographic translation bringing to mind the work of typification in the personal writings of Fernand Baudin, created for the catalogue of the eponymous prize in 2012.