+ + Nicolas Malinowsky + +
Great works by Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi, a design partnership based in Cologne Germany.
It’s not common to see a Social Scientist teaming up with a Designer to create art. And yet, that’s exactly the way creative ventures should be : a concept expert alongside a form expert. That’s what Christensen and Conradi do.
Form follows function, said the Modernists, and the function of this team is to bring critical discourse within the Visual Arts field, an area in which form mostly tends to follow fashion. Christensen and Conradi’s work demonstrates a powerful formula : interesting research-grounded views + cleverly designed artworks = a smart way to convey alternative outlooks well beyond the boundaries of the tiny and nerdy intellectual world.
It works because many people can understand an idea through an image and a short text, but not so many are curious and motivated enough to read a long article or dissertation on the same subject.
Here is what they have to say about their work :
“Thinking, doing, re-assessing, re-doing, re-considering, and then finally attempting to bring into being something that grasps the multiple realities encountered in the process of creating, and then aiming to situate the result within a transdisciplinary contextualized setting, in which the intimation and implication of design can be questioned and renegotiated as a socially responsive and critically aware act”.
And here how they describe the project presented in this post:
Re/Production
“Poster series that deals with the challenge of how two, at the same time opposing and cyclically reacting perspectives, can be hosted within the same words and physical space of a single poster. Both perspectives receive the same space and attention, and only the active word on the poster remains visible at all times, emphasizing the reproductive nature of the two statements. By viewing the poster from the right, and then from the left, the two different perspectives appear. The content of the claims is inspired by some of the universal conflicts that seem to be produced and reproduced through their action-reactionary nature”.
Check their website for more !
