Some people thought it was a mistake when they received the empty envelope. They called up the sender, the city of Halberstadt, to be told that this envelope was indeed their invitiation to the opening of “Discover the vo d”. These people interpreted the void as an absence of something and they wanted to fill that empty envelope, just as one automatically fills in the missing letters of the exhibition title. The invitation had triggered the mental process which the exhibition was exploring.
My favourite graphic designer in the Bauhaus is László Moholy-Nagy. Graphic design was just one of many areas he was working in and his layouts often seem a trifle inelegant and akward. But when it comes to translating ideas into graphic compositions, he is the boldest and the most inventive and engaging. He is trying to tell you something and he wants you to UNDERSTAND that something. That is because he could be your great-great-grandfather. If he was still alive, he would turn 117 this year.
Find the most auratic object in the museum and make a sketch of the way it is presented.
Scenography is per se an area where a multitude of disciplines come to work together. In order to create a compelling exhibition experience for the visitor you have to consider space, movement, objects, words, orientation, surface, light, sound, emotions, products and the translation of physical space into printed matter and digital space.
From years of trying to find the right person to write adequately about our exhibition designs, I know how difficult it is to describe the design of a room with words. In my opinion, the writer needs to accomplish three things:
How to exhibit literature or more specifically Goethe’s famous coming-of-age novel ‘Wilhelm Meister’ ? That was the question put to seven renowned exhibition makers at a conference in Frankfurt in 2009. Being one of the few designers in an illustrous group of mainly literature experts, I suggested to show the book as an object.
