Designblog

Mike Mufasa Edwards, I miss you

Nicolina Eklund — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:28:48 +0000

continuing from ……[Here, here little foxie]

I walk up to the book that I found in the catalogue online and realize that the devil isn’t even orange. Which it was on Google. God damn it. I wrote a shitty text about an orange book that isn’t even orange, and thought I’d get away with it.

In the corner of my eye I see a big, fat, shiny book, almost bursting out from the self a couple of backs away. AMERICA! the back screams to me. Reminds me of my sweet friend Vera, who is absolutely and almost frantically in love with this country. Oh Vera, I sigh, America is just about burgers and cars, what can this book really offer me? I do as I usually do and pick the book ironically.

A jambalaya, the word for hot black dude my friend Irene uses shamelessly, cover the front. Gold tooth and all. It’s about portraits. In America.

I open the book and suddenly I understand why it was so important to actually go to the library and not just surf the catalogue for this assignment. In this glossy package I see dreamers, lovers, haters and the America Vera fell in love with. A sensitivity that needed this screaming shiny cover and assignment for me to see it. And it makes me think about Mike. My best friend’s ex from Miami whom I never hang out with anymore because that would be kinda weird.

He was exactly this book to me eight years ago when they first met. Tall, shiny, too big for the place he was put into, screaming around but with a magnetizing effect that immediately made everything around him dull.

I miss him. And I think I want to go to America, just to see the America that Andres Serrano gave me a glance of with this giant of a book. And Im not even sarcastic know. I really mean it.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: -serra- 3

The Attraction of the Unknown

Till-Michael Homann — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:15:21 +0000

In my third research I wanted to be more concentrated on the tag “paradox” because the last two researches where more based on the focus on the object chair and the humoristic association of the presentation of a chair in those books. Anyways this research now was more extended which made it also harder to find only one book fitting to the tag “paradox” but I stumbled over one book which is besides its outer appearance, the cover work, also a really interesting book about photography. “Mapping sitting” caught my eye first of all because of the title, the word mapping sitting doesn’t make not really much sense to me, not even with the subtitle “on Portraiture and Photography”, which all start to make sense when you see the front cover, together with the back and the back cover of the book. Under the written words you can see old photography’s probably of a square in a big city where, when you take a closer look, the ghost shapes of humans are recognizable, those are overlapped over each over and seem to first build a big and hard to identify mass, on the second and closer look the mass is building a crowd. On the Third look you are also recognizing that the square is also a overlapped collage of photos of different squares which seems to be build one big picture of a square. The impression of just these photo collages on the cover, for me, means documentation, a documentation of another time (all the pictures are in black and white and obviously from the early last century), a collection of photos which have been put together in a book, one page laying over another. Therefore the word mapping start to make more sense; the photos are documented and collected as the information’s of geographical facts on a map, which is my first association of a map. Still the word sitting stays mysterious for me, at least as the title on the cover without knowing the content, because you see actually mostly portrait photos of people sitting, inside the book, but on the cover design I cannot really find a connection to the word sitting. All in all I would probably say that this is the reason why I have chosen the book, the paradox or the not understanding of the title, which makes the book to something exciting.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: 761-bas-1

Pick me.

Sonia Oet — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:58:53 +0000

Hello, i´m very very very small. But worth to pick me out of the closet. There is mold in me, but I can´t do anything about it. I will fit in your pocket. I´m grey but not boring. I can tell you many things but not too much. But sometimes you shouldn´t tell too much because you can figure it out by yourself. I want to inspire you instead of telling you everything. Did you ever thought a person that you met and told everything about their self is interesting? Well that´s the same with us books. Encyclopedia´s are so snobby. They are know-it-all. You don´t want to be neighbors with an encyclopedia on a shelf, believe me. A chick flick is also a nightmare. I think I prefer also the older books. But the more specific ones. I had an amazing neighbor it was an old ancient roman. But it was in pain. The cover was almost hanging of the pages. The conversations were interesting but in the same time painful. Because I could hear the pain. I can only hope that I will get to that age. That I´m interesting enough to be in a library instead of being sold or thrown away. E-reader.. yes, that´s our enemy. It´s getting harder every day. We are in fear. That´s why we don´t want to look old and dirty. Because the chance you will be thrown away will be bigger. Some of us has been thrown away or sometimes never returned. It´s always exiting to be picked in the library. It can be amazing but also be horrible. Some people put boogers in us. Or fold our pages. One of our neighbors had a lunatic that put his dick on every page because he knew people would touch it. It was traumatizing.