Productive Universals—Specific Situations
Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism

Anne Kockelkorn, Nina Zschocke (Eds.)

In today’s increasingly digitalized and neoliberal societies, debates on universals and specifics have gained new momentum. This volume situates the contemporary return to universal claims and concepts in the fields of art, architecture, and urbanism, and highlights the interrelation of the specific and the universal in diverse historical situations from the nineteenth century to the present. The collection’s essays thus venture an epistemic shift of the concept of universality: from essence to modality, from the abstract and static to the performative and productive.

Contributions by Ursula Biemann, Ariane Varela Braga, Gaia Caramellino, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Johan F. Hartle, Samia Henni, Christa Kamleithner, Anne Kockelkorn, Filippo De Pieri, Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, Emily E. Scott, Laila Seewang, Alla Vronskaya, Andrew Stefan Weiner, Nina Zschocke

Published by Sternberg Press

May 2019, English
21 x 14.8 cm, 448 pages, 27 b/w and 82 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-301-1
€25.00

Claudia Comte
I Was Grown Taller from Standing with Trees

Catalogue for the exhibition I Was Grown Taller from Standing with Trees at CC Contemporary, Copenhague.

Bad Bonn Kilbi 2019

—–> check website here

Visual identity for the music festival Bad Bonn Kilbi, based in Düdingen, Switzerland.
Website, posters, animations, booklet, and development of several KILBI typefaces, working as modular logo.

Design with Katharina Reidy
Assistant: Michele Brianza
Website Programming: Thibault Brevet with Alfatih Al Zouabi
Text typeface Gothic by Dinamo

Aita Bott Zuoz

Modular identity, letterhead and business cards for industrial designer Aita Bott. The logo can be read in several directions. This system allows the use of one same metal embossing form for the different media. The logo is also embossed on the back of the wood furnitures by Aita Bott.

Guillaume Pilet & Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris
My Life as a Parade

Dans My Life as a Parade, Guillaume Pilet (1984, vit à Lausanne) livre une série d’une quarantaine de dessins autobiographiques réalisés au crayon, à l’encre et à l’aquarelle. Conscient que « n’importe quelle biographie d’artiste est racontée de façon romancée », il choisit de raconter la sienne comme une histoire pour enfants, faisant défiler souvenirs fugitifs, événements dramatiques et anecdotes passagères sur des chars, comme dans une parade.

Bad Bonn Kilbi 2018

Check the website –––> here

Visual communication for the music festival Bad Bonn Kilbi. Website, posters, booklets and logo.

Designed in collaboration with Clemens Piontek
Website Programming: Thibault Brevet

Claudia Comte 40 × 40 cm

This book is a sort of exhibition space in which things get pieced together one by one on its blank pages, whose confined space gives rise to a playful reduction of the artworks. The pictures narrate an idea, as in a cartoon, except that the graphic works here – which have inspired some of Claudia Comte’s paintings, prints and murals – return from their three-dimensional existence to fit into the two-dimensional medium of the book. In the rigorous play of visual combinations and permutations, the planes, lines and squares occupy a metrical space – an absurdity that turns the book into a kind of two-dimensional sculpture.

This artist’s book is mathematically structured like a Cartesian coordinate system. The horizontal x-axis (abscissa) divides each page into two planes, while the fold down the middle of the book forms the vertical (ordinate) y-axis. This partitioning of the large-format (40 × 40 cm) book produces four smaller squares on each spread.

The Cartesian coordinate system becomes a playful space in which Comte explores the possibilities of her sculptures and patterns as well as geometric operations such as translation, rotation, reflection and glide reflection. The resulting shapes change position, evolving into unique sculptures while remaining part of a larger pattern. They playfully evolve and revolve around the point of origin where the two axes meet, though always retaining their isometry. So the book can be read from all four sides: from the top and from the bottom, from the left and from the right.

Guillaume Pilet
I WAS BORN TO BE DRAMATIC

Artist’s monograph.
With texts by Nicole Schweizer, Sabine Rusterholz Petko.
Under the direction of Nicole Schweizer.
Edited by Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2017

Stéphan Landry
Tout va bien

Edition Patrick Frey & Musée Jenisch Vevey

Advertising slogans, punning neon signs, chocolate brand and movie studio logos – Stéphan Landry’s variegated world of fiction and commerce is a Hollywood idyll in which, as the slogan goes, “Tout va bien”. On sheets of A3 paper during and after his training in Geneva, on squared loose-leaf during his wanderjahre, then softened recycled paper due to dire straits, Landry created a veritable Warholian alphabet executed in techniques ranging from gouache, ink, glaze, synthetic varnish to Tipp-Ex.

The happiness industry may pitch the bright side of life as loudly as it likes: Landry bares its underlying mechanisms by means of exaggeration, turning his pop art into an intimate portrait of the artist and his everyday environs. Landry’s signature mischievousness is all over his iconic works, and he invests them with a sensuality that is less sumptuous than explicit. And yet there they are, anonymous and isolated from the world, silhouettes frail as those by Markus Raetz.

Softcover
304 Pages
18 × 25.5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-906803-44-9
English, French

Presence
A Conversation at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich

Edited by Jürg Berthold, Kristina Hinrichsen, Philip Ursprung, Mechtild Widrich

With contributions by Elisabeth Bronfen, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Hampe, Mark Jarzombek, Amelia Jones, Tom Levin, Dieter Mersch, Rebecca Schneider, Peter Zumthor

Recently, the idea of “presence” has returned to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In February 2013, in Zurich’s historical Cabaret Voltaire, which was central to the Dada movement almost a hundred years ago, an experimental international symposium took place that put presence under the microscope.

Presence: A Conversation at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich is not a traditional post-conference publication but is conceived as a theatrical discussion of ideas between different speakers, both on and offstage. In contrast to transcribed conversations, monologues are interspersed throughout the book, acting like small, performative interruptions. The lively juxtaposition of both individual speech and colloquy is enhanced by theatrical conventions: characters enter and exit; stage directions mirror those found in the cabaret.

In collaboration with Elektrosmog.

www.sternberg-press.com

Selina Reiterer
Series of 3 lookbooks presenting the work of designer Selina Reiterer.

MYKITA MY+

Logo, art direction and leporello design for MYKITA MY+ lenses. These lenses incorporate a polarising filter. In addition to optimum glare and UV protection, they also boast the best possible filter effect against undesirable surface reflections; the result is ultra-sharp contrast. Furthermore, an exclusive gold antireflective coating on the reverse of the lenses reduces unwanted reflections from surrounding light. A hard coating that repels oil, water and dirt ensures clear vision in all conditions. It also offers resistance to smears, fingerprints and scratches while allowing for quick and easy cleaning.

Bad Bonn Kilbi 2017

Check the Website –––> here

Visual communication for the music festival Bad Bonn Kilbi in Düdingen Switzerland.

Designed in collaboration with Katharina Reidy.

Der Wert der Oberfläche
Philip Ursprung
Essays zu Architektur, Kunst und Ökonomie

Concept and layout with Marco Walser, Elektrosmog

Sind Politik und Wirtschaft Motoren für künstlerische und architektonische Veränderungen? Das Forschungsprojekt «Der Wert der Oberfläche» an der ETH Zürich unter der Leitung von Philip Ursprung folgte dieser Fragestellung. Der Begriff «Wert» wird hier ebenso sehr in ökonomischen Zusammenhängen wie als eine Idee der Qualität in Kunst und Architektur gesehen. Wo sind Vergleichbarkeiten etwa zwischen dem frühen Industriekapitalismus, dem Crystal Palace in London, Herman Melvilles Roman Moby Dick und der leibhaftigen Erscheinung eines weissen Wals zu beobachten? Oder inwieweit prägten die Folgen der Bologna-Reform die Struktur der Hochschule für Architektur in Nantes von Lacaton & Vassal?
Aus dezidiert subjektiver Sicht zeigt Philip Ursprung in seinen 14 im Rahmen des Projekts entstandenen Essays Verbindungen zwischen Ökonomie, Architektur und Kunst auf. Seine unkonventionellen gedanklichen Pfade regen zur kritischen Reflexion an. Sie führen in teils neue, teils unerwartete, überraschende Denkräume, die es ermöglichen, Phänomene in bisher so nicht gesehenen, einander wechselseitig bedingenden Erscheinungsformen zu betrachten. Das Buch plädiert für eine spekulative Geschichtsschreibung und fordert dazu auf, manche theoretische Prämisse zu revidieren.

Bad Bonn Song Book, 2016

Check the website –––> here

Seeing as notes are generally the best way of putting music on paper, this publication, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Bad Bonn music venue in Fribourg, takes the form of a song book. Then again, since hardly any of the bands that play there actually notate their music, it’s an unusual song book that’s likely to appeal to laymen as well.

For two and a half years, artists performing at the Bad Bonn were asked to put their songs on paper. The results proved as diverse as their musical styles and personalities, including everything from sheet music and lyrics with guitar tabs to photos and drawings, it’s all there. The contributions show a side of the musicians’ creativity that doesn’t show on stage or on their recordings.

Café Bad Bonn in Düdingen, a small town in the Fribourg canton of Switzerland, was once a health resort and spa, but for nearly 25 years now it’s been a magnet for mobile music lovers by the lake Schiffenensee. Where Bonnstrasse comes to an end in the middle of nowhere stands a building. Behind its modest, almost staid, exterior is a venue with a surprisingly diverse lineup of artists you might see billed in London, Berlin or Paris. Whether metal, anti-folk, country, electronica, indie or hip hop, there’s room here for every niche and fringe in the popular music scene.

Some 2500 bands have played this little stage since 1991, including big names like My Bloody Valentine, Bonnie Prince Billy, The Prodigy, Queens of the
Stone Age, Ministry, Cat Power, The Young Gods and plenty of other international and local bands. Its club concerts aside, the highlight of the year is Bad Bonn’s annual Kilbi Festival. Acclaimed “Switzerland’s best festival” by renowned music critics and cultural journalists, the event has become a permanent fixture of the nation’s performing arts program.

In collaboration with Katharina Reidy
Edition Patrick Frey N° 198
Editor: Patrick Boschung, Daniel Fontana, Stefanie Mauron, Adeline Mollard, Katharina Reidy
With texts by: Conrad Lambert, Chan Marshall, Benedikt Sartorius, Christophe Schenk
Softcover, 528 pages, 264 color images
21 × 29.7 cm
ISBN: 978-3-905929-98-0
Language: German, English, French

www.editionpatrickfrey.ch

Bad Bonn Kilbi 2016

Check the website –––> here

Design in collaboration with Katharina Reidy

Fennesz

Poster for the concert of Fennesz, Morb and Pendler at Bad Bonn, Düdingen.

MYKITA Campaign 2015

Art direction, editing and layout for the 2015 MYKITA Campaign.
Photography: Mark Borthwick

Bad Bonn Kilbi an der Grenze

Identity for the music festival Kilbi an der Grenze, guest in Palace St.Gallen.

In collaboration with Katharina Reidy.

Bad Bonn Kilbi im Fall

Festival identity for the music festival Kilbi as guest at Palace St. Gallen.

www.kilbi-im-fall.ch

Fri Art—Centre d’Art de Fribourg / Kunsthalle Freiburg

Logo and corporate identity for the Art Center Fribourg. In collaboration with Philippe Egger.

GATE 113 / 114

Booklets and book for the Neue Schule für Fotografie, Berlin. Compiling the work of 14 students. The book is available as 14 separated booklet or as a full bounded book with 14 chapters. A color system is assigned to each student.

www.neue-schule-fotografie.berlin

Galerie 1m3, Lausanne

Logo and corporate identity for the Galerie 1m3 in Lausanne. The identity is based on a set of 4 stickers that are use on every kind of communication’s medium–posters, flyers, business card, merch… A blank square allows to add informations per hand. The galerie was run by Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Jeanne Graff, Adrien Missika and Benjamin Valenza until 2014.

In collaboration with Philippe Egger

Vues / Blick 2008 – 2013
Michel Bonvin

Exhibition catalogue for photographer Michel Bonvin compiling his work from the period 2008 to 2013.

www.michelbonvin.ch