Iela Mari’s Silent Books: Creating an Image-based Language for a Media-saturated Landscape
Free event featuring the work of Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari, and Katsumi Komagata
With an introduction from All in Pictures’ Leah Mallen, producer of Coast Modern and Arthur Erickson, which premieres at the Architecture and Design Film Festival in Vancouver this November!
“Few writers yet think of using pictures to make their argument.”
In a media environment saturated with information, what do wordless books of poetry offer us, and what is the future for this tradition? This talk looks at designers, artists, writers, illustrators, and educators who created a modern genre of “quiet” — wordless — books, and how this publishing tradition is re-emerging today.
Designer Enzo Mari’s celebrated prints of apples and pears for Danese can be found in magazines like Domus and Dwell. Enjoying these stylish works, it’s easy to lose sight of the tradition that inspired them, but Mari was part of a “gentle revolution” that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s which modernized and expanded education and publishing, creating bright sparks of excitement and hope during an increasingly pessimistic period. In the 1980s Katsumi Komagata picked up this torch and carried it into the 21st century.
Like his colleague Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari was a design superstar who produced simple books of wordless poetry with his wife Iela, blurring the lines between design and art and book and sculpture. Iela continued on after their marriage ended, creating beautiful works of silent brilliance. Like her fellow authors, her books are better known in Europe and in Asia than in North America.
This talk, accompanied by a rich slideshow of artists' books, looks at the roots and legacy of the gentle revolution, and at some of its key figures, like Mario Lodi and Don Lorenzo Milani, who are lesser known internationally. As we learn to manage our own fast-paced information environment, these gentle revolutionaries have the opportunity to speak to us — through their work — about remaining grounded, human, and open during turbulent times, and they encourage us to develop new literacies of image, colour, and symbol for our own era.
Biography
Robin Mitchell Cranfield is an illustrator and graphic designer specializing in illustrated books and teaches design and illustration at Emily Carr University. She wrote and illustrated Wings, Waves, and Webs: Patterns in Nature and is the co-creator of the Windy series. Robin’s work has been recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Kidscreen awards, and BolognaRagazzi. She holds a BDes from Emily Carr University and an MA in English, specializing in Print Culture, from Simon Fraser University.
THE EVENT
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LOCATION
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