Printed talks in the city
Closed Sunday and bank holidays
Introduction
Biographies
Closed Sunday and bank holidays
The project Printed talks in the city began in spring 2001 through a series of encounters and conversations carried out by Ludovic Balland with several Milanese printmakers (Angelo Colombo, Giorgio Lucini, Felice and Gianni Nava, Massim o and Michele Pizzi). An analysis of the role that posters, newspapers and books have had and continue to have in the history of modern and contemporary man arose. What emerged was a rather multifaceted portrayal of printmakers in Italy: a professional figure that is anything but nostalgic, a painstaking compiler of limited editions, a passionate artisan, a far-sighted global entrepreneur that attem pts to com bine the renowned quality of Italian design with the industry’s worldwide market. From the conversation between Ludovic Balland and Massimo and Michele Pizzi (Arti grafiche Amilcare Pizzi, Cinisello Balsamo) the design and the printing of a series of posters, 10 exemplars in total posted in numerous copies around the city of Milan, resulted.
The workshop participants chose and re-elaborated under the form of payoff, certain phrases from this dialogue (Four color press: we were the first in Europe; Doing a book was a big thing; We are like pandas, people have to protect us; We hope that the Chinese will get richer very fast; In 2020 we should be in a better shape) and answered with their personal point of view (Do you speak four color in Europe?/Buying a book will be a big thing/We are pandas, people have to protect us/Stay here! We are around the corner/We are reloading the paper. Call now!), becoming the text with which the posters were made, retracing all the phases of the work of a designer: from the idea to the linguistic and visual formulation.
Ludovic Balland and Emmanuel Crivelli chose the poster as the central product of communication in the contemporary metropolis, seen as a sort of open-air museum of this medium that is destined to convey codes, symbols and images. In the exhibition Printed talks in the city, that ideally closes the project, the posters produced during the workshop and the reportage of Salvatore Gozzo, specialized in landscape and architecture photography will be exhibited, documenting the public posters linked to the project. The photographs, in which typography overlaps the new Milanese skyline, simply also a social process: the reading of posters, in turn a privileged place for cognitive sharing in the city, to convey a text in a shared space.
On the occasion of the exhibition Printed talks in the city a newspaper has been published. It brings together the images of the posters around the city and the interview by Ludovic Balland with Massimo and Michele Pizzi. The magazine is a free press publication, distributed in public spaces and areas of particular interest in Milan in collaboration with Edizioni Zero, Milan.
This project is the second appointment of Letters on Sale: Changing Design + Print + Use, a series of talks, conferences and exhibition projects in three parts, conceived by Salvatore Lacagnina and Ludovic Balland (graphic designer and founder of the studio Typography Cabinet in Basel), that opened in March 2011 in the Milan branch of the ISR with an exhibition curated by ECAL and a conference on the topic at the Milan Polytechnic.
Ludovic Balland (1973) studied at the Art and Design University in Basel before specializing in printing and print composition. He founded the studio Typography Cabinet in 2006. In 2012 he received the Swiss Federal Design Award for the design of the visual communication of the festival “Warsaw under Construction”, for the new Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. His most recent publications include: the catalogue of the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, the new edition of the new monograph of Herzog & de Meuron. He designed a series of three books “A B C – Teaching Architecture” (ed. GTA Press and Kaleidoskope Press), included in the section of “The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2010” and marked by the honorable mention in the category “The Best Book Design From All Over the World” in 2011. Balland teaches at the ECAL. He lives and works in Basel.
After obtaining a degree at ECAL, in 2008 Emmanuel Crivelli worked in Basel at the studio of Ludovic Balland. He was in charge of the visual communication of the contemporary art fair Art Paris in 2011 and did the graphics of the catalogue of the exhibition “L’Harcourt Toujours (Baccarat)”. He taught graphics at the ECAL and is the graphic designer of Dorade Magazine, with which he received the Swiss Federal Design Award in 2012. He lives and works in Berlin.
Salvatore Gozzo (Siracusa, 1972) obtained a bachelor’s degree in Architecture in Reggio Calabria in 2001. After a brief work experience in the studio of Italo Rota in Milan, he moved to Catania in 2004, where he currently lives and works. He has dedicated himself to architecture and landscape photography since the 90s and collaborates regularly with professional studios, industries and institutions. His photographs have been published both in specialized magazines and none- amongst these Lotus International, Domus, A+U, Wallpaper, The New York Times – and in several books by Italian and international publishing houses.