Niut Blnahce 2017
Artdirection and Design for Nuit Blanche Paris, 2017. With Pierre Vanni.
Special Tag: The Simple Things
Manuel Bürger and Pierre Vanni designed the poster for Nuit Blanche Paris – an all night - free entry - public - art event, spreading over the whole city. Charlotte Laubard, artistic director of Nuit Blanche 2017, choosed the theme "faire œuvre commune" (do common work) and invited
amongst other artists "Invisible Playground" - a Berlin based collectif whose work inspired the poster design.
Invisible Playground's Marée des Lettres is an invitation to all Parisians to compose real, materialized phrases along the Seine ~A~B~C~ by using a special app - which we also designed for this occasion (see below). The game revisits the fundamental principles of democracy: citizens who assemble, make collective decisions and express themselves in the public space.
The poster design plays with these letters, their (wrong) order, yet our imagination and ability of reading it properly. This somehow reminds about an esperanto attitude and sketches a future where understanding and sympathy might come more and more by working together ("faire œuvre commune")...
Very luckily the posters were placed on prominent spots and it did not take long people reacting to it: a rather cute shit storm, accusing the "2 minutes"/ "powerpoint" design, mutated and circulated the key visual further in the digital realm.
In these inward-looking times, we need to work together more than ever before. This year’s Nuit Blanche will exhibit artistic projects which involve different collaborative approaches and works which seek to represent cooperation or to question the notion of community. From two-person collaborations to artists’ collectives, from multidisciplinary groups to systems (set up) to encourage public participation, it showcases projects which aim to push back the boundaries, alter perceptions and change the way we represent things.
A collective work is always the fruit of a process of negotiation between different points of view. As it results from this confrontation with someone else’s subjectivity, it is often heterogeneous or hybrid in nature, and this seems to be more in line with the complexity of the world in which we live. The urgent need to be heard, the determination to take action to change the reality that surrounds us - these are its main driving forces and the factors which lead individuals to choose to work together.
It’s no surprise that public space is the venue of choice for these artistic projects which examine its social foundation. Identity building, collective memory, the ways in which we interact, everything which characterises us as a community or communities - all of these at the heart of the projects featured in this Nuit Blanche. As a symbolic gesture, I wanted it to be staged in places where people of all backgrounds come together.
Acknowledging the fact that the concept of public space has changed considerably with the rise of social networks, a number of works in this year’s event share a distinctive feature - they can be seen both in the city and on the internet.
Charlotte Laubard
Artistic director
> Nuit Blanche Guide 2017
The result of a pioneering collaboration between two graphic designers - one from Berlin and the other from Paris. The poster was inspired by the Invisible Playground collective’s participatory artwork in which Parisians are invited to express themselves by moving around letters to create and mix up words along the banks of the Seine. This jumbled letters effect features on all Nuit Blanche publicity materials. The scrambled words subtly challenge the perception of passers-by and visitors, who have to mentally put the letters in the correct order. With an aesthetic inspired by internet memes, the poster also announces the fact that this edition is keen to explore the porosity between the real and virtual worlds.
About Manuel Bürger and Pierre Vanni
> Nuit Blanche Guide 2017