XENITEIA, OR A TEMPORARY DISPLACEMENT
Year End Show MDes Thesis Project
University of Illinois at Chicago
College of Architecture, Design and the Arts
School of Design
They say that history only repeats itself as a hoax. Sometimes it may be a tragedy. Migration has been a long-lasting wound in recent Greek history. In the beginning of the previous century, the dream had a name: America. After the Greek Civil War, it was called Germany, Sweden and Australia. A common feature of all of these periods of mass emigration, was that people were fleeing a country and a political system that could no longer support its own people. They were fleeing to developed countries, where they could at last make a living and support their families back in the homeland.
The difference between this earlier era and that of modern emigration is enormous. Those who leave are only hopeful that they can live a dignified life. A job, a quality salary, a dream – these are things their ravaged and plundered homeland can no longer offer them because of its system of political and economic corruption, as well as the neoliberal policies of austerity that have been implemented. Greece, having become an immense landscape of ruins, a desert in Europe, is recasting her children again. As it was then.
This project revolves around the notion of Xeniteia, a Greek word meaning to be away from home on foreign lands. It makes public a collection of private archives in an attempt to combine questions about immigration with forms of documentation and performance, inviting the viewer to connect what cannot be connected through a curated archival experience.
Critic and practitioner Michael Rock writes of design’s potential to translate “what it feels like to be living now.*” This project seeks to represent what it feels like to be an immigrant away from home, relatives, and friends, displaced in a foreign land, living a regulated life of uncertainty, constantly “buying” more time, seeking a second chance.
With this work, I hope to instigate an active conversation that questions the causes of migration while exposing a shift in the aesthetics of bureaucratic documentation. Characteristic of broader social and technological transitions, these documents represent a dramatic shift from relaxed, relatively simple standards for migration to today’s strict, complex, and often discriminatory systems of control.
Research pulls together an array of personal interests: modes of production and display, the reactivation of archival material, typographic detail, and personal political narratives. Together these result in an installation, a publication, and a sound/video piece.
*Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers
and Users (New York: Rizzoli International, 2013)
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Photo documentation by Cody Bralts and Alexandros Skouras
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Xeniteia, or a temporary displacement was exhibited at Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven in 2018. It was part of the Antenna Expo – The World's Best Design Graduates, curated by Design Indaba, Antenna Foundation and Dutch Design Week.
Organized Salad is a collaborative publication created by UIC’s School of Design graduate graphic design students. It was designed, printed and bound by the graduate graphic design students at the UIC School of Design graduate studios.
Printing method: Lazer
Binding method: Perfect binding
Dimensions: 8.5 x 11
Copies: 25
This work was created as part of a collaborative workshop between the UIC School of Design and the Basel School of Design, graphic design graduate students. The workshop took place in March during the spring semester of 2017.
Workshop brief:
We live in the historical twilight of the printed newspaper, at the cusp of a new era in which both “everyone is an author” and the news we read no longer exhibits the assurance of truth. From the point of this greater accessibility to the tools of publishing, as well as the political uncertainty which seems to follow from it, we will conduct a workshop, looking backwards to the heyday of print and forwards to its obsolescence, in the experimental production of a “fake” newspaper.
Students will form two teams, each of which will organize a news office for the editing, design and printing of two news editions, an evening and a morning one. Time is scarce in our production scenario: offices must work quickly and figure out shortcuts in their production process in order to make their deadlines. A crucial emphasis of the workshop is on the self-organization of production. How the office works together and co-ordinates its multiple activities is perhaps the major challenge. You must discover production shortcuts and work fast and imperfectly “in circumstances where urgency demands destroying the stages of progression.” Are divisions of labor necessary or do they slow things down? How might editing, typography, and printing be merged as activities in order to make production faster and the news product more interesting?
A note about down time—If you’re waiting for some material to arrive to begin your work, think about how you can accelerate some other part of the total procedure while you wait. And/or reflect on the process in writing.
This is an exercise in experimental editorial form. The newspaper is our conceptual template, but the document you put together need not imitate the look of a newspaper. It should rather experimentally iterate its structure of juxta-posing unrelated elements into an imaginary coherence. Benedict Anderson writes, in 1983:
What is the essential literary convention of the newspaper? If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by Mitterrand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition shows that the linkage between them is imagined.
This work is meant equally as an experiment in typographic form — in the degree of complexity and order you can develop within this highly compressed process. The design should seek to to visually distinguish and relate all the heterogeneous content, as well as formulate a system which allows for maximum decision making among different designers.
Words by: Henry Jack Fisher
This self initiated publication is an attempt to document the 1st year graduate studio at UIC School of Design (room 2320).
The publication consists of two elements. The first element is the dust jacket of the book, which also works as a map of the studio, including a key. The second element is the book itself, which consists of scanned surfaces of the studio printed on the risograph.
In order to read the book and get a sense of the studio the reader need both of the elements . The map includes the shape of the room (a triangle) as well as the position of each scan according to their cardinal direction.
The way the scans are arranged and paced throughout the book is according to the same way someone would encounter the objects while entering the room from the north entrance , moving all the way to the south entrance of the room. They key of the map includes all the titles of each scanned surface.
All scanned surfaces in the book are color coded based on the color outcome of the scans and arranged based on their cardinal direction, starting from northwest to southeast.
Motivational Symbols is a concept project, created for the needs of a Sign, Symbol, Image course. The objective is to explore how meaning can be conveyed by the visual qualities of a symbol. After choosing a product, in this case, guitar amplifiers, the goal is to design a series of abstract, figurative symbols using only lines in order to communicate the object or its attribute as well as the client, in this case, the manufacturer.
Product: Electric guitar amplifiers
Client: Electric guitar amplifier manufacturer
The client is sponsoring an annual meeting for their employees. The purpose of the meeting is to inspire and motivate these people, which will help the company move forward. They’ve asked me, the designer, to design a unified series of original symbols that communicate the issues that will be discussed at the meeting. In addition, they want the symbols to suggest their product or the qualities of the product abstractly.
The issues that will be discussed at the meeting:
1. Communication
2. Collaboration
3. Diversification
4. Renewal
5. Harmonization
6. Inspiration
7. Transformation
The lines represent the sound waves
that are transferred through the air,
coming out of the speaker cabinet
of the guitar amplifier.
This project is a direct translation of an essay film into a book. A typo-translation as Andrew Lister called it. The film is Lost Book Found by Jem Cohen.
Fully transcribed and containing every image of the entire film. This book tries to achieve the following. Invite the viewer into a retrospection about the notion of flanerie. The book contains two different narratives that crossover each other. One narrative deals with Jem Cohen, who is a flaneur himself wandering around the streets of New York in this film. The other narrative deals with other flanuers throughout the history. Guy Debord, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Robert Brownjohn, Eugene Atget … and many more are included in this parallel visual narrative.
ONE is a collaborative publication created by the graduate graphic design students at UIC School of Design during Spring 2017. Budget for printing was provided by UIC School of Design.
Printing methods: Lazer, screen printing
Binding method: Accordion fold
Dimensions: 6.5 x 9 (folded), 26 x 36 (unfolded)
Copies: 500
“One:” presents a cross-section of work created by Master of Design students at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the 2016 - 2017 academic year. “One:” attempts to give an honest and authentic portrait of the program, the students, and their working processes. A mix of works-in-progress and finished outcomes are reproduced at one-to-one scale to give a sense of actual dimensions, original contexts, and physical properties. “One:” can be read in multiple directions and folds out to a single, large-scale poster that emphasizes the cross-disciplinary and collaborative nature of the program.
Spider Sense is a wearable haptic jacket that allows you to feel the environment around you on your own body. This is a brand identity project, developed after Victor A. Mateevitsi approached me and asked me to design an identity for Spider Sense. Victor envisioned a final design that will resemble a super hero emblem, but at the same time he wanted something simple and bold.
The idea was conceived by Victor in 2013 as a PhD research project that would explore new ways of human-computer interaction and improve the quality of life of visually impaired people.
Alma is a soap packaging concept, created for the needs of a packaging design course I attended. The project involved the creation of a new logo, the overall aesthetic of the packaging and the positioning of the product within the competitive market.
This is a series of 12 posters (groups of 4) I created in an attempt to visualize the concept of morphology using typography, colors, lines and shapes.
REDJAC is a bicycle event company based in Chicago, IL. This is a series of poster created for the needs of the September 12th 2015 REDJAC event. Founder Eric Alvarez reached out to me seeking for a design solution and it proved to be a very enjoyable project.
This is an experimental workshop project. The objective was to capture the range of typographic expression possible within a particular typeface by creating an arrangement based on a 3x3, 3 inch square grid.
During the development of this composition considerations were made, related to letterspacing and kerning, case (upper and lower), weight, and ligatures.
Poster concept for a local event. Experimented with glitched images, laser printing and the risograph.
Ongoing branding project for Rivers Eatery and Pub in Schiller Park, IL. More coming soon.
This is an experimental workshop project. The objective was to capture the range of typographic expression possible within a particular typeface by presenting a word in a form that communicates as much as possible about the word’s meaning. Use a 9” x 9” square format for each.
During the development of this composition considerations were made, related to letterspacing and kerning, case (upper and lower), weight, and ligatures.
Ordinary Everyday Objects (OEO) is a concept event poster design, created for the needs of a photo communication course I attended.
Vintage Vinyl is a brand identity concept project, created for the needs of a brand identity course that I attended. The client is a record store in the northeast side of Chicago. It’s classic, it’s vintage, its old school, but it’s definitely not contemporary. So, by choosing the words classic, vintage and independent, to describe the brand’s main attributes, I communicate them through a more contemporary solution.
My main focus was to let the brand speak for the client. Having that in mind, I try to experiment as much as I could and finally create something that will communicate and feel like it is Vintage Vinyl.
Pencil illustration
*Graphic design course assignment
Emoji interpretive study with UIC students.
This is a series of graphics created for my friends in Imperial Garden Records.
Imperial Garden Records
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The Black Book of Inventors (BBOI) is a personal publication. It's an abecedarian about 26 revolutionary inventors that changed the world as we know it today.
* I do not have any rights for the photographs and copy used in this concept layout. This is a school exercise created for the needs of a publication design course, I though I would share with you.
Summer Olympic Pictograms (SOP) is a pictogram concept project, created for the needs of an assignment, while attending a Sign, Symbol, Image course. The objective of this assignment was to design a set of six indexical signs that use physical “links” to communicate six sport competition events at a summer Olympic Games. In addition to communicating the sport competition events, the signs have a style that communicates the “host country.” The “style” teaches the audience something about the culture of the host country.
Host Country: Russia
Style: Russian Constructivism
