Between - Graphic design between boundaries

Between is an international graphic arts event, taking place in Palermo, Italy from May 12-16, 2008. It aims to gather major designers and studios from every corner of the world to discuss various topics, all more or less linked to design. A part from new, most interesting lectures, the conference will host a series of workshops which involving students and designers in themes connected to the subject. And there will be exhibitions on show, in various parts of the city throughout the duration of the event.

Between, the title of the conference was chosen for its spot-on description of the location. Because Palermo has forever been a place of passage and permanence of various cultures, oriental and occidental. From its ancient Phoenician origins up until today, the various origins have come to define a complex and composite system, their traces still clearly visible. They compose the uniqueness of this place, which, although not always in a peaceful manner, has known how to conciliate the presence or understanding of different cultures with tolerance. The lasting riches that these passages have left in Palermo exude from every fold, in its architectures, its toponymy, its colours, tastes and scents, in the way its trees have been planted, as in the way water is transported, and its gardens, and engraved in its stone. Palermo is located at the heart of the Mediterranean, and still plays the role of an important and active point of transition, “between”, where it is possible to perceive a heritage from the East, via Arab countries and from there back to the Byzantines. And from the West of the Normans and Swedish. The words that Braudel chose to define the Mediterranean, can be transposed and apply quite perfectly to Palermo:

What is the Mediterranean? A thousand things at once. It is not a landscape but innumerable landscapes. It is not a sea but a succession of seas. It is not a civilization but a series of civilization layered one on the top of the other. […] The intersecting Mediterranean, the heterogeneous Mediterranean presents itself to our memory as a coherent image, a system where all is melted together and recomposed in an original unity […]

The conference in Palermo will try to rumble this space in-between cultures, this free zone where contamination and overlaps are obvious, on a borderline, where the closeness and compression of cultures create a complex system, where only tireless efforts can succeed in undoing the knot, characterizing the single contributions combined in an unique and complicated system.

In the same way, we will try to observe similar realities, by transposing the terms of these questions within the limits of visual communication, in a search for the chinks in which the overlaps confront each other their many tangent points or lines.

Our goal will not be to dissect the terms of the question, but to observe what happens in the field of visual communication, when it moves upon or even better between limits, of whatever nature it may, they have been constituted in.

Between will obviously not have a single meaning, but many, defined by everyone in his own meaning of the term. From the beginning of the borderline and between the two blocks of Oriental and Occidental cultures, it may progressively work its way from the macro to the micro dimension, to enter more and more into the merit of visual communication the “between” between graphics and advertising, text and images, black and white, rules and exceptions, ethical and aesthetic, paper and pixel, single and multiple, typography and calligraphy, if only to name a few.

Between will also offer a cross-sectional view of other disciplines and will do so by calling upon specialists in various fields (art, cinema, music, architecture, design, photography…), to offer their thoughts which can be shared, to stimulate not only looking where we are used to looking into, but also into apparently very distant fields.

Typevents Europe
Via Piccard 18
42100 Reggio Emilia
Italy

Simone Wolf
email: simone@typevents.com
cell phone: +39 334 18 14 389

Typevents Europe is speicalized on the graphic arts sector. The company organizes event and consults the named industry in business issues (traditional and via the web), PR and marketing.

This release was published on openPR.