“Through mark-making, we leave behind our traces of existence, immortalizing our
thoughts and feelings on canvas.”
- Edgar Degas


The “What is the Contemporary?” essay inspired me and other classmates so much that we wanted to use this title again for the End of the Year Exhibition. This focused a lot on our point of view. Encouraged us to think about our project and how unique our thought process might be, how this related to “the contemporary,” and why we should be interested in it. Individuality. Point of view. This exhibition would be just a collection of many different paths, ideas, and dialogues coming together. We want to answer a bigger question through our point of view.


_the poster
This is why I started focusing my visual research on things that would include more. That would represent a “coming together” of several people. Duality and individuality at the same time. Throughout this year, I also discovered how mark-making and the “act” of doing something with my hands always created something more organic within the composition. It would make it more real, less stagnant, and not fully digital. Even if, at the end of the day, most of the work is being achieved behind a computer, the feel of something made with hands somehow enriches the final visual with imperfections, small details, and mistakes that also bring the front this individuality that we are trying to feature, through our answers.

I focused on mixing different elements: handwriting, pictures, and font, for the poster, that was the first element of my design. It came together quite easily and informed strongly all the rest of the design assets that I created for the exhibition.


_the catalog
I wanted to feature everyone's individuality at best in their catalog spreads. I focused on a clean and uniform design, modern and with a touch of the orange that is present as the identity of the exhibition. I then, after preparing a first draft of the material, asked everyone to interact with their own material, commenting something about their process, about their text, or just embellishing their work how they see fit, capturing more than a mere collection of pictures of projects, but the essence of the authors itself.


_the catalog essay
After visiting a couple of exhibitions around London, I had the chance to reflect on how to design and incorporate identity in every aspect of this project. This is why I started reflecting on the essay usually required in a book/catalog to present the topic and the scope of it. It’s difficult to explain “contemporary”; it’s challenging to set and explain our point of view of a group of people, trying to avoid doing something too general and keeping the singular voices alive. Individuality, again, is at the center of the stage.

I’ve been aware of AI. I indeed used it for simple tasks like brief descriptions (that needed to be edited anyway) or to have an idea of how something should be written. This sparked a reflection. AI is built with the collective understanding of human input. AI knows the answer because we inform it as is “general” WE. It’s the polar opposite of individuality. AI gives a result based on our collective thinking. Is this why AI also produces the most bland results? The ones are fine because they are non-specific and partially informative. I decided to let the AI write the exhibition prompt for our catalog. Allowing AI to answer “What is the Contemporary?”

From there, I produced a base text that must be edited. But not through a computer, through again digital meaning. Through marginalia, mark making. I am spreading this document with everyone involved in the Exhibition and giving them the power to re-write their version on top of the one they are presented with. Our collective effort will be shown in the outcome. Our voice, our version of it... that might include partially a generic idea of Contemporary, but enough worked through our sensibility to filter all typical nonsense. A collage of the result will be placed on the catalog’s first page and used as an animated video in the exhibition curation to re-iterate our point of view.