Amandine Alessandra: News & Projects / Portfolio

Some of my video and photography-based typographic work will be shown by the Word Art Collective
at the Hoxton Arches from Wednesday 21st November to Saturday 8th December 2012.

The Word Art Collective is a non-profit initiative established by a group of curators and writers based in London, generously supported by the European Commission and partner gallery Hoxton Arches.

The show is curated as an exhibition of art and design by artists whose work explores the theme of European identity, taking as its base an interest in language.

Venue
The exhibition is to be held at Hoxton Arches, Arch 402, on the edge of Shoreditch.
Arch 402
Cremer Street
London
E2 8HD

Opening hours
The exhibition will be open to the public from Wednesday 21st November to Saturday 8th December.

Monday: Closed
Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: 11am – 6pm
Thursday: 11am – 9pm
Friday: 11am – 6pm
Saturday: 11am – 6pm
Sunday: 11am – 6pm

Typographic performance at Liverpool Street Station (18:00:00 – 19:00:00)

For Clerkenwell Design Week 2011 DesignMarketo is setting up at the Farmiloe Building on St John Street in collaboration with the Barbican Art Centre. I will be giving a (free) workshop based on stop motion and typography, using the iconic building space as a grid to produce a human typeface.
Wednesday 25.05.11 from 2-4pm

Also: do not miss Alexandre Bettler‘s workshop on mobile typography:
Thursday 26.05.11 from 5-pm

24-26 May 2011
34, St John Street, London
EC1M 4AY

http://designmarketo.com/events/clerkenwell-design-week-2011/

Body as letter form
This experiment takes advantage of the fact that a lot of the typographic vocabulary is based on the human body: anatomy, body size, head piece, footers.
Same thing for the book: a book has a head, joints, a spine, back and foot.

mapplethorpe ll

This is a second version of the Mapplethorpe alphabet, using the American photographer’s world as a mood board.
This is part of my research on how to get a letter to mean more than it reads.

A few more letters here.

Rhyming slang is a form of English slang in which a word is replaced by a rhyming word, typically the second word of a two-word phrase (so stairs becomes “apples and pears”, feet “Plate of meat”, etc)
People used to say “Fred Astaire” for “hair”, but here you go, as time goes by, the younger generation doesn’t know who the hell that Fred is, and tends to use “Tony blair” instead.

Research on contextual lettering, or how to get a word to say more than it reads.
The typeface made of blue rubber gloves is called Marigold, the black leatherish one is Mapplethorpe.

This week, instead of going to work, I asked dozens and dozens of strangers to stop whatever they were doing to draw a heart with their hands.

The adaptation of Thomas Fuller’s phrase “A book that is shut is but a block” in the previous bookshelves installation was illustrated by my use of the book for their shape and colour, rather than content; as it is, Muller-Brockmann orange grid book is only interesting for its vermilion a4 shape.

Building up the letters also reminded me very much of typesetting, as every type made of colored books had to be blocked with white books, just as it is done in letterpress, where large areas of white space are created by wooden blocks called furniture.

A book that is shut is but a block.

I thought of this experiment as a tautology: shut books that are therefore just blocks used to talk about the fact that shut books are just blocks.

Same as before but thought of as an installation/live type.