Feb 27, 2020
PARADOX ALG(I)ER(S) Verena Gerlach, Silk Screen Posters, 2010
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PARADOX ALG(I)ER(S) Verena Gerlach, Silk Screen Posters, 2010
PARADOX ALG(I)ER(S) Verena Gerlach, Silk Screen Posters, 2010.
PARADOX ALG(I)ER(S) Verena Gerlach, Silk Screen Posters, 2010.
For this series, Verena focused on life under surveillance, censorship, culture, everyday life, and patriarchal structures within society in Algiers.
“I was prevented by the government from giving the second workshop. The idea was to send the students into their city to research and document everyday life, the architecture, lettering on the buildings etc. Each student was then to create a poster based upon this work to depict the beautiful examples of the visual language of Algiers in a new context. Instead of cancelling the project, however, I decided to undertake it myself.” - Verena Gerlach on Paradox Algiers.
It’s a very white male heterosexual field I am working in. You hear all sorts of nonsense; one Swiss typographer said women aren’t as good as men because they get pregnant in the end. Sometimes you wonder whether a guy is interested more in your bum than in your work, though, most of my male colleagues are very nice.
Verena Gerlach on working in Type Design with Cafe Babel.
FF Karbid Pro designed by Verena Gerlach.
Source: http://www.fraugerlach.de/work/karbid/
Karbid Inspiration
“Towards the middle of the 1980s, Verena Gerlach, a Berlin-born adolescent, regularly crossed the control post on Friedrichstraße to visit a friend living in the east of the city. She started to note and to memorise the inscriptions, shop signs and murals that decorated the facades of buildings and shops, painted in most part between the 1900s and 1940s, and left to decay. After the fall of the wall, Verena, now a student in visual communication at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, deepened her exploration of the areas in east Berlin, more specifically Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. Here she gathered photographs between 1991 and 1998, documenting a large number of shop signs and facades. She returned in 2005, endeavouring to review her initial viewpoints, and could not fail to notice the effects of reunification: this unique epigraphic heritage had almost completely disappeared, covered by the contemporary dealbatores of capitalism.” Source: http://www.fraugerlach.de/work/karbid/
You have to choose whether you take black or white, you can’t work with grey. It’s yes or no, you have to make clear decisions in your design.
Verena Gerlach on type design in interview with Cafe Babel
Kommune Type Specimen