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DemDesign

@o.demdesign

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Research and writing on contemporary art and design by @nic_fab

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In this statement, Munari challenges the long-held division between applied design and so-called ‘pure’ art. Within the industrial system, the designer often became a neutral executor rational, silent, efficient. But Munari reminds us that the designer, too, imagines, distorts, questions, creates friction.

This piece plays with repetition and texture to reflect that friction between function and intuition, clarity and noise. Between the grid and the gesture.

To design is not only to solve problems it is also to raise questions, provoke senses, and shape culture.
The designer is not simply a tool for consumption. The designer is, indeed, an artist.

#DEMSpeaks #VisualDisobedience #BrunoMunari #DesignAsArt by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

How do graphic forms become part of collective memory?

In retypeLagos, I explored the town of Lagos in southern Portugal through a typographic lens not to design new forms, but to reencounter existing ones. Letters found on facades, shop signs, and handwritten advertisements were collected as visual relics of a vernacular graphic language that is simultaneously anonymous and deeply situated.

Rather than treating typography as a formal or aesthetic exercise, this project understands it as a social and affective one. I redrew the letters and returned them to the people of the town inviting them to hold, quite literally, the signs that once framed their daily landscape. This gesture of return transforms the act of design into a cycle of recognition: of people, of place, and of the silent design cultures that emerge beyond institutions.

RetypeLagos it was a documentation and reactivation reclaiming visual fragments that belong to no one and yet to everyone.

#retypeLagos #vernaculartypography #graphicmemory #designasreturn by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

This image is not a finished work, but a pause within the process itself, a moment where ideas have not yet taken a defined shape and are confronted with matter. It is in this space that the friction between art and design becomes evident, on one side, design questions its purpose, demanding function, clarity and a recipient, on the other, art allows gesture, error, the suspension of “why?” and “for whom?”.

Here, the final result is irrelevant. What matters is the space of attempt, where ordinary elements, a piece of fabric, a cardboard cut-out, a t-shirt, become material for study and rehearsal. The improvised structure itself acts as a precarious grid that holds more questions than answers.

This record is part of the exercise of accepting the unfinished, of recognizing that process is also creation, even when it remains in its raw state. by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

“We may look at war, but only through the mediations of images.” — Susan Sontag

Inspired by Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, this work investigates what it means to give form to what wounds without aestheticizing the wound, and without silencing it.

Its as residue, a graphic remainder of something absent, a surface marked by violence it never directly witnessed.

Smudges suggest impact. Lines divide and cross through imagined structures.
The grid collapses. The body of the wall becomes porous.

In these minimal abstractions, the question is not how to make war visible, but how to remain ethically implicated when facing what is not ours when confronted with histories we did not live, but still shape us.

The central line it is a rupture.
A reminder that all representation of suffering is also a risk of distance, of misreading, of transforming pain into symbol.

Still, the work insists. It fails and insists again.
Because some images don’t speak. They haunt.

Bosnia, January 2022.

#regardingthepainofothers #demdesign #graphicwounds #tracesofwar by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

The poster repeats the phrase “DON’T BUY THIS” in a manner reminiscent of product advertising, but instead of highlighting, it performs a repetitive negation that overlaps itself, generating a kind of visual noise. At the center, a nearly formless black stain cuts vertically through the semantic field, acting as both interruption and mask of the language.

This gesture invokes the Pygmalion effect in reverse: if in pedagogy and psychology the concept refers to a self-fulfilling prophecy shaped by projected expectation, here there is a collapse of that expectation. The piece plays with visual desire (I want to see, I want to understand, I want to consume), only to frustrate it. The viewer is compelled by the repetition, yet prevented from grasping the whole. Like a fogged window display, the piece reveals and conceals, it states and retracts.

Within the context of art, this move aligns with the tradition of the anti-ad and critical image strategies that sabotage the codes of advertising to expose their symbolic violence. The stain may be read as body, censorship, or trace: a presence that contaminates the message. Thus, the poster does not simply say “don’t buy,” it makes it impossible to fully comprehend what this is.

The “THIS” remains ambiguous and polluted.

#criticalimage #antiadvertising #visualdesire #pygmalioneffect by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

The image seduces, but denies full access. It offers itself to the gaze only to retreat deteriorating, fragmenting, slipping away. This paradox of proximity and disappearance disorients the spectator, generating a space of friction where meaning is no longer stable but contingent, precarious.

To look becomes an act of risk not of consumption, but of loss.
The viewer is confronted with an object that resists preservation, that refuses to be fixed or fully possessed. The image teases interpretation, but never settles, it provokes longing, yet dissolves before it can be absorbed.

This dynamic echoes Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator, no longer a passive receiver of content, but an active participant in the construction (and deconstruction) of meaning. Here, the spectator is not merely watching, they are implicated. They witness not just the image, but its vanishing and in doing so, become co-responsible for its disappearance.

In this act of looking arrested, unstable, unfinished a different politics of the image emerges. One that is less concerned with representation than with exposure. With the residue of what escapes capture.

What happens when the image refuses to remain?
What kind of relationship do we form with something that does not wish to be owned?

#arttheory #chocolat #screenprint #aesthethic by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

This work engages critically with the systems of legitimation that frame the contemporary art object.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, it interrogates the very terms often used to define artistic value “authentic”, “natural”, “technical”, “process”, “dominance”, “work”.

Rather than serving as mere signifiers, these words are scattered, constrained, redirected interrupted by graphic gestures and inscribed within compositions that hover between control and collapse.

The use of spray paint industrial, rapid, irreversible operates as a mechanical reproduction and as an act of inscription.
The “work” is no longer an enclosed entity, is a discursive field: semantic material rendered unstable and political.

#WalterBenjamin #MechanicalReproduction #ArtAndPolitics
#CriticalAesthetics #DemDesign by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

Love begins with hesitation and ends in echo.
Between “Er…” and “Pá pá pá,” this piece captures the sound-body of passion fragile, erratic, and temporary.

In a present ruled by speed and disposability, feelings become consumable, timed by algorithms and rushed silences.

“In the age of mass communication, only what moves fast survives.”
Boris Groys

#typographicpoetry #emotionalflux #borisgroys #designasanact by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

The wall is not neutral.
It absorbs, it marks, it divides.
Here, it becomes the surface for an insult perhaps the first many of us heard before even knowing who we were.

FAG WALL summons the violence embedded in words etched onto bodies and architecture, where space ceases to be merely physical and becomes deeply symbolic.

Plastic cheap, disposable matter becomes the banner of a marginalized lexicon, structured by lines of tape and coded color.

As Paul B. Preciado writes, “the body is the first political space.”

This work asks: if the body is a territory, what are the walls that surround it?
And more urgently: who wrote on them first?

#contemporaryart #queerart #artasresistance #visualpolitics taken in Lisbon, Portugal by @o.demdesign

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a year ago

Are our memories truly ours, or are they visual constructs shaped by the cultural codes of their time?

Images are not neutral records.
They operate as dispositifs machines of visibility that produce meaning, define what is memorable, and what is to be forgotten.

“Images are symptoms that demand interpretation: they are never just what they show, but how they show, and why they show it now.”
(Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, 2000)

To remember someone through an image is to remember them through the aesthetic grammar of an era.
Style, gesture, ornament these are not details, but vectors of historicity.
They inscribe the body within a regime of appearance,
often dictated by the market, gendered norms, or visual economies of desire.

The earrings in this photo, once ordinary, become a metonym for a temporal atmosphere.
They are not just accessories, but aesthetic evidences of how we archive affection, how we historicize the intimate, how the visual and the emotional are co-produced.

#criticaldesign #didihuberman #imageandmemory #designasdiscourse #visualregimes #aestheticasarchive #demdesign taken in Lisbon, Portugal by @o.demdesign

10

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a year ago

“The samovar is a slap in the face of current consumption habits, which are that I want my matcha latte, you want your Americano, this person wants a mint tea. A samovar means everybody drinks one tea, together. […] A collective is, for me, almost a form of infusion.”
Slavs and Tatars, Mousse Magazine, Issue 86

This print is a failed uniformity.

A collective that didn’t quite align. A set of faces stamped, not designed resisting digital perfection through analogue imprecision. Each eye is a glitch. Each mouth, an uneven refusal. The sameness becomes noise.

It echoes the samovar metaphor: instead of obsessing over a singular, hyper-curated identity (your drink, your filter, your face), this work proposes a shared surface broken, stained, collective by force and failure. by @o.demdesign

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a year ago