Dates and times of the workshop:
At the Fienili spaces
13 May 2024: Room 2 Fienili – 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
15 May 2024: Room 2 Fienili – 2:00 pm – 6:00 pm
At the Campo Boario spaces
14 May 2024: Room 1A Campo Boario – 2:00 pm – 7:00 pm
17 May 2024: Room 6B Campo Boario – 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm
24 May 2024: Room 6B Campo Boario – 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm
31 May 2024: Room 6B Campo Boario – 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm
The workshop is aimed at students of the three-year course in Editorial Graphics and is divided into two main themes. Each macro-theme is divided into two modules with a specific workshop activity. The workshop has a total duration of 25 hours divided into 6 lessons taught by lecturers Giancarlo Carpi and Helena Velena and allows the student to obtain 1 CFA.
First macro-theme: AVANT-GARDE AND COUNTERCULTURE.
Futurism – The following module concerns Futurist graphics, understood both as avant-garde artistic experimentation and as period publishing production consisting of publications linked to the Marinetti Movement, primarily book and magazine covers. The formal theoretical innovations mainly of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Francesco and Pasqualino Cangiullo, Fortunato Depero and Tullio D’Albissola will be presented. From the new centrality of typography in the “parole in libertà” (“L’immaginazione senza fili e le parole in libertà”) to the “tavola parolibera”, from Depero’s research in advertising graphics to that in lettering, which paid attention to the creative potential of seriality. Then, finally, the material reinvention of the publishing medium (the bolted book), a theme also explored by Tullio d’Albisola and Marinetti in the tin book. As for canonical publishing production, its course over about thirty years will be outlined. For the magazines of the 1910s: “Poesia”, “Lacerba”, “L’Italia Futurista”, “Dinamo”; for the 1920s: “Roma Futurista”, “Noi”; for the 1930s “Futurismo”, also touching on minor publications such as “La Balza”, “Stile futurista” and others. As for the works in volume form, the discussion will focus mainly on the “Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia”, the production of the early 1910s and on female production: from Benedetta Maria Ginanni, from Irma Valeria to Adele Gloria, from Laura Serra to Maria Goretti, from Franca Maria Corneli to Dina Cucini, up to poetry collections such as the “Canzoniere futurista amoroso guerriero” (1943). Workshop activity of the “Futurism” module: students will have to develop a publishing work aimed at integrating the varied instances of encroachment between linguistic codes implemented by Italian Futurism into a single experimental object, also in terms of overcoming the narrative dimension in favour of simultaneity. They will be able to creatively combine the period material made available by the lecturer, which consists of: “parolibere” plates, paintings that emphasise the pictorial and compositional values of words and letters rather than their semantics, advertising paintings, unorthodox formats and materials, lettering, inversions of the left-handed ductus, photodynamic sequences, photographs of sculptures and works of applied art connected to the surrounding space, which can in turn be taken as a model for the final form of the book-object.
Punk – The following module, taught by Helena Velena, a key figure in the history of Italian punk and Italian alternative music and culture, introduces students to the graphics of musical and publishing countercultures. The course will cover the aesthetics and expressive forms of punk, as an imaginary of social rebellion expressed in form as well as in substance; the graphics of punk covers, where the image is already a message; the graphics of concert posters and flyers, as moments of (political) aggregation rather than of band fans; the graphics of punkzines, i.e. the totality of the content of the expression of rebellion. Along with Punk, the main extreme cultures that have influenced fashion, graphic design, aesthetics and forms of expression in a coherent way will be covered, such as “extreme metal” (with its subgenres such as “industrial metal”, which uses the post-human cyberpunk imagery, creating a fusion between body and technology), “black and dance music”, which graphically returns to punk, “trap” with its relationship with luxury and fashion magazines, “free jazz”, etc.
Workshop activity of the “Punk” module: students will have to develop a publishing concept aimed at a specific counterculture, putting into practice the valuable experience of punk and subcultures as a socio-artistic narrative and a complex and integral imagery in all its expressive forms. In particular, starting from the analysis of graphic material from a given period of time, they must demonstrate that they are able to trace it back to the specific cultural context and that they know how to elaborate it by capturing the distinctive features that determine its sense of belonging to the specific musical counterculture, and which can vary across a spectrum ranging from the intimately personal to the purely social, while remaining in a context strongly linked to everyday life.
Second macro-theme: PUBLISHING, PRODUCT, GOODS.
Japanese Neopop and Lowbrow – The following module concerns the historical interaction between the editorial graphics of American underground production and Japanese production, from the 1930s to the 1990s, and the artistic production of Californian Lowbrow and Japanese Superflat. The aesthetics of these artistic movements, in fact, are indebted to and historically originated from the aforementioned publishing context. As for Lowbrow, we will analyse its origin in Kustom Kulture (Ed Roth) and in the Californian underground comic of the 1960s, “Zap!” (1963), in record graphics, between Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, and then the avant-garde breakthrough by Robert Williams, who brought those stylistic features into the field of painting, inaugurating the movement. As for the part dedicated to Japan, we will see how from the 1930s to the 1990s – through the works of illustrators such as Nakahara Jun’ichi, Nishitani Yoshiko and others – an iconological continuum developed based on “cute” and westernising stylistic features that led to the birth of Takashi Murakami’s Japanese Superflat in 1990. This part also aims to make students aware of a canonical conceptual problem of Pop Art, namely the overlap between commercial arts and art, and therefore the uncertainty about what properly falls within the scope of the latter, addressing it starting from the confusion/difference between editorial graphics and the pictorial work, between the narrative work and the “work of art” that these artistic movements have articulated in an experimental way. Workshop activity of the “Japanese Neopop and Lowbrow” module: students will first have to develop a graphic story, the contents of which will be based on the mass media stereotypes of the Otaku subculture exemplified by the lecturer. Subsequently, the story will be deconstructed to develop, in a publishing catalogue, derivative products:
action figures, gadgets, merchandising of various kinds, everyday objects, even including a narrative rewrite of the initial story. Finally, the student will be asked to create a “pure” work of art based on mass media stereotypes, in an attempt to reverse the process of commercial deconstruction of the narrative, recovering a profound meaning.
Italian independent publishing in the 1990s – The following module, also based on the experiences of direct collaboration of the lecturer Giancarlo Carpi as an author and publisher, is dedicated to the publishing story, especially in the graphics sector, of some Roman publishing houses: Castelvecchi Editore, which in the 1990s emerged as one of the main interpreters of the new digital cultures; Tunué (Latina), which in the 2000s presented an innovative publishing proposal combining comics and non-fiction; Lantana Editore, co-founded by the lecturer in 2010; and Jimenez edizioni, founded by Michela Carpi in 2018, specialising in music non-fiction. This final part of the workshop will also feature the participation of the founder of Jimenez edizioni, who will provide an insider’s view of the practical challenges of publishing work.
Workshop activity of the “Italian independent publishing in the 1990s” module: following the graphic design of some emblematic books published in the 1990s by Castelvecchi Editore and other small Roman publishing houses, which later became famous, students will replicate the graphics and apply them to publishing proposals of their own invention.