1. Summary
2. Context
3. Projection

MAGCD
SPRING 2024
LONDON < > BOGOTA

Hungry Sayings [from Colombia]

Have you ever heard the expression: “Don’t cry over spilt milk”?. Somewhere in our quest for understanding the link between language and culture sit those linguistic expressions, idioms, and sayings that can only be understood by communities in their particular contexts.

Hungry Sayings [from Colombia] explores the relationship between vernacular language, visual culture, and bilingualism, by translating traditional Colombian sayings about food, closing lexical gaps between local expressions of my mother tongue, Spanish, and my everyday language, English, celebrating the uniqueness of locality in the context of a globalised landscape.

Context

In this instance, exploring facilitation of cross-cultural communication through endangered publishing formats, takes shape in the form of a collectable album of cards directly inspired by the Jet Natural History album, treasured by several generations of Colombians. Paired with the intervention of Molinari Graphics collection of vernacular imagery, this contextual study explores the interection between language, image and communication.

The existance of this workshop in itself is an act of cross-cultural communication between Europe and Latin America. As Antonio Molinari himself embarks in a quest to shape and by shaped by the local culture through the printed image. The contents of this archive form the foundation of this body of work, as a reframed context comes to light by interveening, suberting and reimagining the image as a tool from cross-cultural communication in the 21st century.

Projection

Considering the role of the designer in codifying and shaping culture is intrinsically connected to the rapid proliferation of media and the agency of graphic communication in how we understand, perceive, and engage with the world, particularly during the last century.

At a time when our globalised societies create significant challenges for cultural preservation, they also offer us wider visibility of the world as a whole, enabling us to understand ‘the other’ in a new light. My work considers the posibility of closing the gap between the things that make us different while celebrating the uniqueness stored in local histories, attitudes, and narratives through graphic communication design.

Bibliography

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective. 2024. The Photographers Gallery London. Exhibition (viewed January 29, 2024) Díaz, R.J. (2018)

Las Populares Gráficas Molinari: Versión, subversión Y perversión de las imágenes. Bogotá, Cundinamarca: Ministerio de Cultura. Eisenreich, U. (2024) Uta Eisenreich. Available at: http:// www.utaeisenreich.xyz/ (Accessed: 9 February 2024).

Graficas Molinari (no date) Archivo. Available at: https:// graficasmolinari.com/archivo (Accessed: 08 May 2024).

Las Populares Gráficas Molinari (2022) Museo La Tertulia. Available at: https://museolatertulia.com/laspopulares- graficas-molinari/ (Accessed: 21 April 2024).

Martens, K., Elliman, P. and Kuitenbrouwer, C. (2004) ‘The world is a printing surface’, in Karel Martens Counterprint. London, England: Hyphen Press.

Nacional de Chocolates (2019) Evolución del álbum de chocolatinas jet, Chocolates JET. Available at: https:// chocolatesjet.com/historia/evolucion-del-album-dechocolatinas- jet/ (Accessed: 08 May 2024).

Ospina, A. (2012) Bogotalogo: Usos, Desusos y Abusos del Español Hablado en Bogotá. Available at: https:// centrodocumentacion.idpc.gov.co/opac-tmpl/cendoc/ apariencia%20cendoc/site/images/descargas/ bogotalogotomoII.pdf (Accessed: 22 April 2024).

Rock, M. (2019) Designer as author, 2x4. Available at: https://2x4.org/ideas/1996/designer-as-author/ (Accessed: 29 April 2024).

Sandford, S. (2018) The Dream is a Fragment: Freud, Transdisciplinarity and Early German Romanticism (2016), Radical Philosophy. Available at: https://www. radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-dream-is-a-fragment (Accessed: 06 February 2024).

Trudgill, P. (1983) Sociolinguistics: An introduction to Language and Society. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Vallejo, I. and Whittle, C. (2023) Papyrus: The invention of Bibliography books in the ancient world. London: Hodder.

Evy Prentice

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