Opening #1 of 2
Friday April 9th, 20:00
Exhibition open until May 30
Thursday to Sunday's, 13:00-17:00 and by appointment
Each medium has its own group as the target of its communication. In everyday use each medium both has its core readership and incidental consumers. These groups are addressed by an idiosyncratic use of language and image, of visual and textual rhetoric. An editorial board chooses a specific approach and in doing so applies a specific form. That is what editorial design is. Editorial design gives colour and takes positions. Editorial design is politics.
But which position is actually taken and in what sense is this position coloured? At this moment, there are many discussions about what our media landscape is offering. Public broadcasting would no longer disseminate rightist opinion, and every opinion magazine is set aside as leftist by populist commentators. A lack of clarity seems to have emerged concerning the identity of the media and our identification with the media. What is left, what is right, and what is pure reporting? What do we want to engage with?
‘the Form and the Frame' engages in the construction of media. Onomatopee has assembled editorial boards to investigate the editorial design of specific opinion magazines; to approach their typical usage of text and image. The investigations will include formal aspects such as the relation between image and text, the normative content of the headlines and so on: hard facts. ‘the Form and the Frame' ignores actual subjects as described in actual news, it does not touch upon actual issues. Through its formal approach it places the normative framework on the agenda.
Photography by Verse Beeldwaren
Research and imagination
The editorial boards comprise visually and textually capable persons with a knowledge of editorial design. The editorial boards will design an article, both visually and textually, formally addressing the values concerned. The article will be widely made accessible. The current lack of clarity in the media landscape will be made tangible and provided with a better insight.
Presentation
Of course the resulting articles, brought about to the public, will also be featured in the Onomatopee project space. Additionally, Onomatopee shows the registrations of the editorial board meetings, thus revealing their considerations and choices to the audience. These meeting will be presented through film recordings and minutes of the meetings, among others. In order to provide this project and the current tension with a historical context - this problem is of all ages - there will be film screenings that consider these tensions in the past.
Through this project, Onomatopee intends to place the communication of our opinion on the agenda. ‘the Form and the Frame' both triggers our opinion and engage the professional community, especially in the area of communication, politics, graphic design, and media.
The visitors will very much be encouraged to pick up the pen, to take the editorial opportunity to actively edit the framework of this formalist play.
Knowledge development and responsibility
At the end of the project, reflection and additional content will be collected at a public encounter with experts and condensed into a publication. As is common to all Onomatopee publications, this publication will make the render the additional layers of meaning transparent.
Editorial Board 1:
Eric de Haas, graphic designer
Bart Groenendaal, artist, writer
Merijn Oudenampsen, citic, researcher, writer
The Form and the Frame
Special film screenings
2-euro entrance.
April 29th, 21:00
Citizen Cane, by Orson Welles, is a 1941 American drama film. The story is a roman à clef that examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a character based upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Welles' own life. Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers. Kane's career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. The story play's against a background of mass media’s final breakthrough.
May 6th, 21:00
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, is an analysis of the news media as business. Using the propaganda model, Manufacturing Consent posits that corporate-owned news mass communication media — print, radio, television — are businesses subject to commercial competition for advertising revenue and profit. As such, their distortion (editorial bias) of news reportage — i.e. what types of news, which items, and how they are reported — is consequence of the profit motive that requires establishing a stable, profitable business; therefore, news businesses favoring profit over the public interest succeed, whilst those favoring reportorial accuracy over profits fail, and are relegated to the margins of their markets (low sales and ratings).
May 13th, 21:00
Manufacturing Dissent is a 2007 documentary that asserts that filmmaker Michael Moore has used misleading tactics. The documentary exposes what the creators say are Moore's misleading tactics and mimics Moore's style of small documentary makers seeking and badgering their target for an interview to receive answers to their charges. The film was made over the course of two years by Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine after they viewed Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's controversial film that attacked the Bush administration and its policies.
Graphic Design, PR, exhibition, and publication:
Marjolein Delhaas
Camera:
Ron Eijckman
exhibition design advice:
Hadas Zemer
Artistic Director and Project Coordinator:
Freek Lomme
Onomatopee 50.1: Nest#2
(con)textual
What do we really read?
Duo-exhibition: Anne Dijkstra and Peter Koole.
Opening Friday April 9th, 20:00
Exhibition open until May 30th
Thursday to Sunday's, 13:00-17:00 and by appointment
Book launch and artist talk:
Friday May 28th, 20:00
Within the framework of he Onomatopee project 'By Method of Reasoning' Rudi Laermans, a critical sociologist, described how the visual can't express itself without a textual frame. Without text and explanation, the visual form would be limited in its communicative reach. This also holds the other way round, as Onomatopee demonstrated with Jack Segbars' project ‘Rondom’: the textual form also has its own sphere of display.
Both Eindhoven based artist Anne Dijkstra and the Rotterdam based artist Peter Koole create artworks, ‘flat works’ such as drawings and paintings, in which they relate visual documentation to inter-textual, autonomous reconfigurations. Operating by means of textual deconstruction, explorations of the connotative field between original truth and subjective truth formation, these artists visually question our reading of literary anchor points such as the daily news (Koole) and the classics (Dijkstra). By using what could almost be considered design typologies, they de- and reconstruct this framework. By producing these statements, they engage in an ethical debate concerning our reception of the visual: what do we really read?
This project thus complements 'the Form and the Frame', an Onomatopee research project on display during the same presentation period.
This second exhibition in the NEST series showcases relevant practices from the Eindhoven region. NEST offers a space to these practices through an exhibition at the Onomatopee project space, and a publication with in-depth texts on the work, presented during a special artist talk.
Curator: Freek Lomme
Assistants: Mareike Bremer and Irena Boric
Graphic design: Raw Color
(Christophe Brach and Daniera ter Haar)
Onomatopee 32: Cabinet #2
Untranslatables
A worthy scent for the local and the global.
Uffda, morbo, colorido, tubli, polegnal and jufli: some of the words presented in the Untranslatables. Each word originates from another language. All words share one common ground – untranslatability.
When translated, a word is traveling from one language to another. The word's shape is changed, but its concept, or idea behind it, remains untouched. But what happens if a word cannot be translated? If there is no term that can be its equivalent within a different context? Therefore, untranslatable words have the potential to become lost in translation. These words are missing the right concept to be utilized; they stay untranslatable / lost in translation.
As language echoes life's situations and certain customs, untranslatables are showing varieties and particularities of such situations and customs within different linguistic spheres, often within different geographical contexts. A comprehension of the particular scope of linguistic signification, specifically a vocabulary, provides space for an understanding of particular customs and culture. As untranslatables, these words can add up to the vocabulary of other languages, for they can linguistically signify more specifics.
Yolanda de los Bueis, Christoph Schwarz, Elisa Marchesini and Sarah Vanhee brought about the reach of these untranslatables in order to fill in the possible gaps and understandings. Accompanying these words and there textual explanations, photos are presented to serve as extension or further experience of the scope of these words. These photographs are not depictive; they rather focus on body language with the potential to inscribe different meanings, lost in translation. The message of it might be clear, but there is always a possibility not to be understood.
An 'untranslatable' is special, even unique for the particular community. 'Untranslatables' offers a contextual understanding of these words, offer a further experience with these signifiers and their cultural body of signification: with the modes of specific linguistic communities. What do they express and how do they express it? Therefore, this project doesn't aim to realize a dictionary, nor a linguistic research about the structure of language itself. It rather tries to outline the scope of words as signifiers, on a level of human subjectivity and on the level of cultural voicing.
By emphasizing untranslatability, the authors bring about individual and particular characteristic of each language, both with pluralist respect for the subject as with Universalist qualities; a unique combination. They both bring about extra qualities to the global as they voice specific qualities of the local! Through this book these unique elements connected to customs, or just lingual contexts, are made visible to the ones placed outside of that community. Furthermore, they are clarified in English that is used as a common ground for such trans-lingual dialogues.
A project by Yolanda de los Bueis, Christoph Schwarz, Elisa Marchesini and Sarah Vanhee
Graphic design: Remco van Bladel
Exhibition curator: Irena Boric
www.untranslatables.net