Abstract
We have all lost and our planet confirms this every day. Exhausted by the mistreatment it has been subjected to for generations, our planet has finally decided to trigger the countdown to extinction, because we human beings understand danger only when the meteorite pointing straight at the earth becomes visible to the naked eye. It is only then that defeat can become a constructive opportunity from which to start again. This is the compelling message on which we have based this issue of Progetto grafico, the last by this editorial staff. We have explored central themes of design culture and hope to have helped keep the debate alive. The archival section that introduces the magazine features the exhibition Vegetation under Power (10.12.2021 – 20.2.2022) recently hosted at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Starting with a herbarium from the nearby Kreismuseum in Bitterfeld, the eight curators offer alternative visions to the ‘purity of modernism’, shifting the attention to its most contaminated gut. This time round, nature is not an object of contemplation, but an integral element, part economy and part ecology, for exploring the logic and consequences of extractivism on a given territory. Loss implies deprivation — and Gianluca Camillini’s contribution addresses the void to be urgently and inclusively filled in the well-worn narratives of the history of graphic design. Michele Galluzzo responds to the call by looking at Enrico Fontanelli’s work for and with the band Offlaga Disco Pax, analyzing the loss of authorship in the practices of quotation and re-appropriation common among the independent musical currents of the Emilian province. Simona Riccobene also moves the margins to the center of her story, using Sicily’s neo-avant-garde magazines to show a cross-section of the widespread independent Italian artistic and literary activity that began in the 1960s. About thirty years after the invention of the web, interface graphic design is an established field. In this scenario Davide Giorgetta raises questions about the transience of the web, opening a space for historical reflection in order to shape the fragmentary narration that characterizes it. Loss of information is also loss of visibility. The essay by Jonathan Pierini and Ramon Rispoli reflects on the political value of the conditions of visibility both in the design of architectural space and in the space of the image that represents reality, determining spaces of existence and action. Umberto Eco considers loss as an indispensable condition in the field of linguistic and literary translation and interpretation, so that the original text must necessarily undergo a transformation for the sake of understanding. Something very similar happens in visual communication — because communication it is — where complex concepts, be they a client briefing or content of various kinds, are transposed from the semantic level to the graphic-visual one for the sake of user clarity1. As described by Laura Bortoloni, Alice Corona and Matteo Moretti, this transitional process, involving the subtraction and simplification of data, was used in the Designer Hackathon Urban Dataviz to allow a wide, heterogeneous and not particularly graphically literate audience to understand the importance of the data made available by the municipalities of Rovigo, Adria and Villadose. Alexandra Zsigmond, author of the visual section of this issue adopted a similar approach. The final eight pages of the magazine offer a series of visual metaphors that condense meanings, followed by a dialogue between the designer and Giulia Cordin about the fate of design projects, how they come about and how they evolve, with particular attention to workflows and discarded drafts, which exemplify her daily professional practice as an editorial art director. Taken as a whole, these contributions indicate the need and the ability to free the design project from a positivist perspective so as to recover the reflexive dimension of a double movement that makes it a form of dialogue. It is precisely to this double movement of the design process, this contradiction of sorts, that we have aimed to give form in Progetto grafico issues 33 to 38. Gianluca Camillini and Jonathan Pierini