Art Direction
I had the pleasure of creating four fanzines for The Little Workshop project for Spore Initiative conducted in July 2024. The process involved going through beautiful image and text materials from the participants, with a lot of room for me to play with typography, illustrations, colours, scanning plants found in our surroundings, and motifs. The Little Schools’ invitation was to create a space for practical learning and exchange on topics such as environmental justice, health, and food sovereignty. A focus was put on those practice-based forms of knowledges, that enable different relationships to the land, forests, water, biodiversity and the plants that feed and heal us, while often being marginalised or not recognized as "valuable knowledge". Over the course of one week, participants took part in a variety of workshops for creative new methodologies and knowledge sharing. The contributions were:
Decolonial Plant Knowledge, with Abeni Asante
Empowerment and power sharing in nature education, with Anthony Owosekun
Singing and community. Workshop exploring the voice as an instrument for collective expression, with Carolina Riaño
Food and Body. Memories that inhabit us, with Chepita
The decolonial tomato. Picture stories about seeds, migration and the healing self, Sarnath Banerjee, and Mikhail Lylov
Plant allies for tending transformation, by Siegmar Zacharias and Shelley Etkin (SocialBodyApothecary).
Food by Jasmine Al-Qaisi, Fatma Savun, Aline Winchester
You can peruse through the zines at Spore Initiative.
This Voice, Singing & Community zine is one out of five workshops and zine contributions that formed part of the Little School, a summer school program that took place in July 2024 at Spore Initiative, in Berlin Neukölln. Carolina Riaño Gómez (the host of this workshop) is a Colombian singer, born in Bogotá, Colombia, began her studies in Classical Singing at the "Pontificia Universidad Javeriana" in Bogotá and then moved to Germany to continue her opera studies at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, where she completed her Masters in Opera Singing. She has been part of several Latin American music projects among others the women's vocal quartet Chocolate com Laranja and the Afro-Colombian fusion jazz band Ambrodavi with whom she has released two albums "Cuentero" (2020), "Coraza" (2022). In 2022, during her residency at Cordillera Space for Bodies and Utopias, she developed her solo performance Canto Crudo about field songs. Since the fall of 2022 she has been the director of the Female Latin Choir "Canto Diáspora".
For my research and art direction - collectivity, free floating singing words, musicality, and Argentinian motifs and musical intruments became the primary inspiration for creating this zine.
Memories that Inhabit Us zine is one out of five workshops and zine contributions that formed part of the Little School, a summer school program that took place in July 2024 at Spore Initiative, in Berlin Neukölln. The workshop facilitator Chepita; is a person from Abya Yala who has been learning about plants and food since early childhood as part of life and family interactions. Likes being around nature and enjoys sharing spaces with people getting involved in topics around food and collective knowledges. Also interested in community care, health, climate and social justice and the interconnectedness of these topics in the network of life. Working in playful ways on recovering health sovereignity through small actions in our daily lives. Chepita is part of the health collective Casa Kuà in Berlin.
The provided texts and materials felt like a beautiful poem painting very visually the steps and instructions to make sounds with your body as collective exercises, using ritualistic and playful aspects. For this zine, drawing out these very visceral exercises and movements and capturing body parts and sounds as a narrative became my playground to experiment with.
At Studio VEH, there is a practice of conducting an in-depth brand workshop with any potential client, or a current client venturing into something completely new facilitated by Franziska Veh. One of the exercises during the brand workshops is to define a certain archetype for the brand - like a personality type of the brand. This immersive activity always leads to some of the most fundamental epiphanies and revelations of character traits of the brand’s nature, goals and objectives. This further leads to refining what the brand wants to communicate internally and externally, what it stands for, what it offers and why it offers that.
With complete creative freedom and a clean slate, I was tasked to conceptualise the design of these cards. Being fully inspired by tarot cards, their complexity and their aesthetic - I had a wonderful time creating 12 artworks that fit into these archetypes. My process entailed a lot of trial and error, sketching, repetition, symbolism, motif-researching and color theories.
The 12 archetypes are: The Caregiver, The Creator, The Ruler, The Innocent, The Sage, The Explorer, The Lover, The Everyman, The Jester, The Magician, The Rebel & The Hero. These are further categorised into groups of three representing structural traits, autonomy traits, connection traits and leaving-legacy traits.
The labour of love and in-depth process behind archetype and trait-finding, in addition to the illustrative and mystical style of the cards - led me to further carry out a photoshoot that complements those aspects.
Colapso Studio is a Barcelona based office established in 2015 by Susana Piquer, operating internationally across various scales of design. Their aspiration is to create environments that improve the quality of life of those who inhabit them, be it through an object or a space. From the start of an idea to execution, Colapso Studio aims to harmonize the delicate relationship between utility and subtle beauty. From the start of an idea to execution, Colapso Studio aims to harmonize the delicate relationship between utility and subtle beauty.
I had the wonderful opportunity to work closely with Susana, understand the essence of her studio - plan together and execute photoshoots and work on the production of Arch. Below you will see one of the few tasks we worked together on - the studio’s catalog with its most cherished projects spanning objects and spaces. Photography by: Olga de la Iglesia, Laia Sabaté.
While working at Studio VEH, we got to collaborate with the German independent publishing house called Voland und Quist to completely freshen up their brand keeping in mind an ever-evolving, curious and contemporary audience. While researching the brand, it was very interesting to learn about the dualities in the concept of the publushing house. Their name comes from combining the devil called Woland from the Russian classic Master and Margherita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Quist comes from Quinten Quist from Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven.
The first strategic task to address was the restructuring of all editions and publications they maintained over the years. As a solution, we developed an umbrella brand system that can house all existing and future publications in equal subcategories. For the logo, we decided to merge the initials V and Q into one iconic, bold and memorable symbol that goes on all their books – which celebrates the bold and independent legacy also of the publishing house with all its polarities dancing together – good and evil, order and chaos, fate and free will. To highlight their signature vibrant and playful personality, we proposed a wide-ranging and versatile color scheme with an expressive and freshly released typeface, called Mint Grotesk by the foundry Lift Type.
Animation: Lind Haugaard
Along with Sanaya Ardeshir AKA Sandunes
music, we conceptualised the visual universe of her upcoming album
called The Ground Beneath her Feet. Rich with
powerful voices of women, new-found confidence, style and maturity in her own sound - we
spent months researching visual styles, art directions and different storylines that complements
the music and its creation, and makes it tangible for the audience
and the artists involved. After doing an extensive
photoshoot in Goa, India involving trash and the interaction of women’s tired feet with planet earth
- the former being used as a metaphor for the
plight of climate crisis, we eventually all zeroed
in on a bold and minimal direction, featuring
scanned feet. Scanning became our main tool
and main medium, and the experiments with
materials, different positions of feet and playing
with light-eventually led u sto a very 90s style,
that feels very true to the sound of the album.
The Airport Society is a collective of opera artists and social entrepreneurs based in Belgium and Germany. The projects empower artists and participants to develop new platforms for social interactions in polycultural societies. Breaking all stereotypes of the elite roots and exclusive environment surrounding opera culture, TAS has been all about entitling minorities and intersectional voices that have historically been underrepresented and systemically oppressed in the exclusive universe of opera. During my research about opera’s cultural evolution, we established that these bold sounds and powerfully vulnerable voices are the most distinguishing feature and most universally celebrated. This became an essential aspect that we wanted to represent visually, and chose to turn it into a typographic language present throughout the identity and communication channels.
Photography: Camille Cooken
Living in Berlin for a little while now, I can safely say that Germans take their garbage and recycling extremely seriously. It’s not uncommon to hear of anecdotes where neighbours reprimanded you for not making your cardboard package flat before throwing it, or removing the plastic from the envelope and discarding that in a separate trashcan. As inspiring and fascinating it is, it can also be a tad bit confusing and specific the more you wish to do it right. Despite how systematic it is and how straightforward it seems from the bird’s eye view, the confusion happens when we are dealing with mixed material items. To add to that dilemma, each German city and town follows their own set of rules too, making standardisation not so efortless. This has resulted in a garbage problem in the city despite having one of the most practical systems in place. To tackle this very real issue, I decided to create a social project that first, brings awareness about the intricacy of the system especially to foreigners and expats. Second, develop social media and digital channels that makes it easy for people to ask questions, upload photos and understand the system of trash separation with ease. And third, get in touch with BVG.
Magis in collaboration with Konstantin Grcic, created the Bell Chair - an environmentally conscious, 100% recyclable piece of furniture at an affordable price. Bell Chair is an honest attempt at making quality furniture accessible and available to everyone, by being conscious, smart and optimised at every level of conception and production. We wanted to tell the story of the process, the design, the features and the democratic nature of the chair by creating its own website. I worked on the conception and execution along with the Magis team and Konstantin Grcic.
Check here - www.bell-chair.com
Banned. Magazine is a collection of interviews, research papers, ideas, tips and tricks in a comprehensive direction towards drug literacy. Conceptualised and created during the postgraduate programme at ELISAVA, Barcelona in collaboration with Andrea Terzian - the magazine was a component of a larger initiative and project called The FIX | Museum and Research Center for Drug Literacy developed as part of our course. The subject aims to deal with decriminalisation and destigmatizing of drug users and drug addiction by making it a health/medical issue, not a legal one. We pushed towards making the usage safe, making dos, donts and warnings accessible, and providing a knowledge base in an interactive and credible way for every user around the world. Digitalising information and ensuring its free and accessible were the most significant aspects conceptually and ethically, for us to push forward throughout the initiative.
Photographers featured: William Wegman, Cru Camara, Kelsey Mcclellan, Stephanie Blum, Bill Jacobson, Frances Berry, Jeremy Watts, Jonathan Nata, Natalia Roberts, Jamie Nelson, Mark Whalen, Alex Prager, Dutch Intervals, Katrin Korfmann, Raw Color
Writers featured: Leandra Malkovich, Lee Harris, Anastasia Welsh, Luna Hetswinkle, Harold Zhu, James Yeh, Rasmus Folehave Hansen, Tallulah Jenkins, Michelle Færsch, Gina Albarn, Raymond van Mil, Edward Shephard, Allison Tierney, Nicholas Lord, Louis Jensen, Giovanna Breu
Artworks by Trey Wright