This event is over, and is now archived in this video essay.

Free Talk for the Alcuin Society · Wed Sept 11 · 7pm · The Post, 750 Hamilton, #110

Iela Mari’s Silent Books: Creating an Image-Based Language for a Media-Saturated Landscape :

Featuring the work of Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari, and Katsumi Komagata

Event description:

In a media environment saturated with information, what do wordless books of poetry offer us, and what is the future for this tradition? This talk looks at designers, artists, writers, illustrators, and educators who created a modern genre of “quiet” — wordless — books, and how this publishing tradition is re-emerging today.

Designer Enzo Mari’s celebrated prints of apples and pears for Danese can be found in magazines like Domus and Dwell. Enjoying these stylish works, it’s easy to lose sight of the tradition that inspired them, but Mari was part of a “gentle revolution” that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s which modernized and expanded education and publishing, creating bright sparks of excitement and hope during an increasingly pessimistic period. In the 1980s Katsumi Komagata picked up this torch and carried it into the 21st century.

Like his colleague Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari was a design superstar who produced simple books of wordless poetry with his wife Iela, blurring the lines between design and art and book and sculpture. Iela continued on after their marriage ended, creating beautiful works of silent brilliance. Like her fellow authors, her books are better known in Europe and in Asia than in North America.

This talk, accompanied by a rich slideshow of artists' books, looks at the roots and legacy of the gentle revolution, and at some of its key figures, like Mario Lodi and Don Lorenzo Milani, who are lesser known internationally. As we learn to manage our own fast-paced information environment, these gentle revolutionaries have the opportunity to speak to us — through their work — about remaining grounded, human, and open during turbulent times, and they encourage us to develop new literacies of image, colour, and symbol for our own era.