Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Skopje… take your pick.
I have fond memories of Yugoslavia, so I was delighted to chance upon an online collection of graphics from this former nation, here.
Yugoslavia came onto my radar when I was 10 years old (living in Switzerland at the time) as a result of a pen-pal who I corresponded with in the northerly city of Novi Sad (now Serbia) on the Danube. On boxing day the following year (I was 11, it was 1965) I boarded the Orient Express in Basel for a 32-hour epic train-ride to go visit my friend “Rosie” on the other side of the Iron Curtain (I still can’t believe how much trust my parents placed in me to do this on my own—hard to imagine in today’s over-protective context). Needless to say, I had a blast, I learned a lot (including some significant life-lessons), and I was enamored by almost everything I encountered.
During the late 1960s we would occasionally make day trips into Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) while on family camping trips in nearby Austria. During the 1980s, I visited designer friends in the Zagreb area (now Croatia) with my wife, and spent some fine holiday days in/around Bled (now Slovenia). Later on, I was invited to contribute works to and then serve on design juries of ZGRAF (including one visit in 1991 in the midst of what had become a civil war). The last time I was in (former) Yugoslavia was during the Icograda events in Zagreb, Croatia, in April 2001.
I’m looking forward to another visit to these remarkable Balkan lands some day soon… in the meantime, I’ll enjoy the vintage nostalgia here.
Bruxelles, Belgium
Illustrations/recherches
pour la création des visuels
du colloque “Share/d Heritage”
organisé par la Scam*
à la Bibliothèque royale
de Bruxelles
autour de la question
de l’enrichissent
par les créateurs contemporains
de la numérisation
et de la mise en ligne
des patrimoines culturel.
(work in progress—more here)
Vienna, Austria
Mladen Penev is a Bulgarian-born artist/photographer now working in Vienna. This powerful piece and its expression of “clean slate” (illustrating the impact of branding on an impressionable/defenseless consciousness) entitled Tabula rasa is exemplary of the fine work he does… see more here.
Manchester, UK
The hell of war comes home. In July 2009, Colorado Springs Gazette published a two-part series entitled ‘Casualties of War.’ The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping, and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A separate investigation into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.
(from wearedorothy) Read the ‘Casualties of War’ articles here.
Images: plastic moulded toy soldier figurines with bases, 7cm high
Ortisei, Italy
Willy Verginer is a Tyrolean woodcarver, living and working in the picturesque Val Gardena, surrounded by the Dolomites. His stunning, life-sized wooden sculptures are highlighted with a vibrant palette of acrylic colors…
See more of Willy Verginer’s beautiful figurative work here and on his own website (well worth the visit), here.
Algerian Sahara
From the sloping dunes of the Sahara comes a groundbreaking design process that turns waste from refugee camps into jewelry as beautiful as the intentions behind it. Royal College of Art student Florie Salnot collaborated with Sandblast, a London-based nonprofit that works with the Saharawis of Algeria, to find a creative yet economic solution to raise awareness about their cultural displacement. Old plastic bottles from the refugee camp are collected and repurposed into remarkable faux-gold jewelry that reflects their local traditions.
Read more of this story (with additional images) in the Ecouterre article here.
“These stunning pieces prove that
upcycling can be synonymous with
sophisticated and inspired artisanal work.”
Esslingen, Germany
Three weeks ago I was visiting designer friends in this charming Swabian burgh… the after-dinner conversation swung towards influential German typographers and Gestalter such as John Heartfield—to my delight, when I mentioned his name our hostess jumped up from the table to fetch (after a bit of searching) a portfolio of Heartfield prints she had acquired back in the 1980s when she was a socialist activist in Berlin (all prints I had never seen before).
John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld on 19 June 1891 in Berlin-Schmargendorf, Germany to Franz Herzfeld, a socialist writer and Alice née Stolzenburg, a textile worker and political activist. He changed his name in part as a way to protest World War I (and he even feigned madness to avoid returning to the service). During the Weimar period he became a member of the Berlin DADA group, where he used his collage work as a political medium, incorporating images from the political journals of the day. He edited “Der DADA” and organized the First International DADA Fair in Berlin in 1920. Sharply critical of the Weimar Republic, Heartfield’s work was banned during the Third Reich, then rediscovered in the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s.
I’ve posted about John Heartfield before and have long been fascinated by him—his politically charged photomontages during the Nazi regime ended up influencing successive generations of artists and graphic designers.
Above: a small sampling of Heartfield’s diverse work; The hand has 5 fingers; Serenade; Adolf the Superman. Below: a 1971 stamp from DDR (East Germany) in Heartfield’s honour.
