Katja Gretzinger
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A workshop with the design students of the Tallinn Art Academy, 2005
Examining the diversity of a city like the Estonian capital and - even more importantly - finding out something about its microcosms, was the starting point for our workshop.
How does Graphic Design influence the perception of a certain location, and how do posters - beside the ordinary use for advertising - relate to the place where they are put?
We held a two-week workshop with first and second year Graphic Design and Photography students from the Estonian Academy of Arts. Fortune favours the brave: we asked the students to throw darts at the Tallinn-city-map in order to randomly pick places to work with. After visiting and inspecting the selected spots, taking photos, making notes, etc., the students started to design and produce posters in the given format: 60x90cm, while personal relations to the places had to be found or constructed. By dealing with the unexplored, the evolving ideas revealed unexpected visual, historical and textual viewpoints. Towards the end of the workshop the finished posters were taken back to the fifteen locations around Tallinn, displayed, and photographically documented within their surroundings. In this way, the final poster exhibition happened twice: first throughout the city and secondly in the gallery space, accompanied by a photographic documentation and short information about the processes behind it.
The culmination of the workshop exceeded all expectations in demonstrating how the potential of a seemingly banal location can be unleashed to extraordinary effect. The students showed what can be achieved when the classic ideas of poster design are put aside for a moment, in order to become totally in tune with context and situation.