Eva Rucki - Troika
Souvenir
Workshop November 30 – December 3 2010
Public lecture November 30
Download "Souvenir" workshop booklet (coming soon)
See and download Eva Rucki’s lecture and interview
Eva Rucki earned her MA in Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art. Prior to founding Troika she worked as a designer for Ständige Vertretung, Berlin, and as an editor at Bermudashorts, London, following a first degree in Graphic Design at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Eva is a visiting lecturer at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication.
Workshop brief
Souvenir
A souvenir is a thing a traveler brings home as a reminder of a person, place or event. The french origin of the word souvenir means 'memory'. A memory is something inherently personal, yet it is hard to imagine anything more banal and chlichéd than the offers of the manufactured memory trade - the mass market souvenir industry.
From the jungle of glittering masks, miniature gondolas and bridges on display at Venice's souvenir stalls to the mountains of Tiramisu in Treviso's duty free - today's souvenirs readily feed the expectations of often out-dated modles of national identity and tourist iconography.
The idea is to create personal, imaginative, poetic, humorous, possibly shocking embodiments of an aspects of Treviso's local culture and history. The workshop is not primarily concerned with the look of souvenirs, but rather how they relate and translate a facet of the patchwork that makes up Treviso's identity - a question that is increasingly relevant in the context of global homogeneity.
The outcome doesn't necessarily have to be a product or an object. Your souvenir could take the form of an embodied memory and become a performance or the final format could be an app, a souvenir that keeps forever changing.
You might decide that a cliché is part of what we look for in a souvenir, and take this as a starting point to subvert our expectations. If you decide that the changing demography of Treviso is worth commemorating, your souvenir could pay tribute to the particular memories of unheard minorities.
Schedule:
Day 1 - Tue 30 Nov
Presentation of Brief
Form small groups of up to 3 people
The first day is dedicated to research. The aim is to find a topic within the context of the brief that inspires and fascinates you. Don't just research into the blue, but think about interesting areas connected to the subject matter of the brief, starting points could be:
- what does the souvenir industry look like?
- what is the context in which souvenirs are sold ?
- what is the most re-produced/sold souvenir of the world?
- why do people buy souvenirs?
- what kind of people buy souvenirs?
- who do they by them for?
- who produces souvenirs?
- who should produce souvenirs?
- what is Treviso's biggest cliche and where does it come from?
- what kind of souvenirs are existing for Treviso? can you hijack them?
- what is special about Treviso's local culture?
- what is Treviso's most depicted landmark?
- what is its most neglected landmark?
- which landmark should exist in Treviso?
- what does memory mean and what is the nature of memory?
- How can a memory manifest itself in physical format?
- which shape or format can a souvenir take?
Each one of these questions could be the starting point for some exciting research. Make your research a project, don't just google images, go out there, interview people, pretend you are a tourist for a day in Treviso, get the newspaper, uncover an urban myth ...
Collate your research findings and organize them into different topics. At the end of the day you should have collected a wealth of photos, sketches, drawings, texts, quotes, brochures, collected images, souvenir and non-souvenirs.
The day should finish with a decision, which starting point you would like to pursue within the project. Formulate what fascinates you about your chosen topic.
Day 2 - Wed 1 Dec
Present your findings separately in small groups and envisage which end format your project will take. Are you creating a product, an application, an installation, a tool, a sign? Would it be mass produced or is it a one-off?
At the end of this day you should have one or more sketch designs how you think to implement your idea. Propose a feasible idea. Even if you don't actually produce the product/object/installation, your proposal should be grounded in reality and you should have a good idea which processes are needed to realize it.
Day 3 - Thu 2 Dec
This day is dedicated to production of drawings, images, prototypes, sourcing of samples, etc.
Develop your design keeping your final presentation format in mind.
Your final presentation should include the following:
A keynote/power point presentation roughly structured according to the following points:
- Research findings
The edited version please! Only include what is meaningful in the run up to the final product.
- Starting point / Short concept introduction text of minimum 200 words
Communicate what fascinates you about it and why it is relevant, how you have re-interpreted the brief
- Design Concept
How does your concept translate into a product/app/object/etc.
- First Visualisations
Drawing, render or collages of your final products
Place it back into context
- Final output
Prototype and material samples
Produce quality images of final output.
If you are working in a group decide, who is developing bits. Be realistic what can be achieved in the time frame you have.
Day 4 - Fri 3 Dec
Use the morning to collate everything you have produced into a presentation. Presentation deliverables must be of highest quality for the workshop website and booklet publication.
16:00: Presentation by each group of their project.
The presentation should be concise and snappy and live through visuals.
Each presentation should last no longer than 10 min.
Presentation will be attended and commented by guest commenter Catherine Ince - Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery London.
Culture Needs You!
By Catherine Ince
Throughout the eighteenth century privileged young men from across Europe travelled the continent, largely to Italy, on the Grand Tour. This educational rite of passage introduced aristocrats and wealthy gentry to works of art and music, classical antiquities, and the legacies of renaissance culture. Such travel was considered vital to develop ones intellect and knowledge of all things worldly, cultural and artistic. Travellers often returned home with paintings, sculptures, books and other carefully crafted items keen to display their rich cultural experiences, and this commercial potential led to a flowering of works produced by native artists and craftsmen. Landscape and portrait paintings, prints and drawings were commissioned, and more marketed, portable keepsakes such as fans, spoons, tableware, jewellery and pocket watches often decorated with iconic images of local ancient monuments and city scenes were readily available to buy. Venice and the Veneto was, for the British elite, the ultimate Grand Tour destination and the place where one might commission a veduta (Italian for view, and a common type of painting of this period) by such celebrated Venetian artists as Canaletto or the Guardi family.
The collection of souvenirs - as religious memento, keepsake or to convey ones social standing - was by no means unusual during this time. But a significant increase in international travel and growing personal consumption in the industrialising nineteenth century meant the mass-production of such aide-mémoires grew rapidly, as never before [1]. If we travel to the Veneto today one still finds similarly styled goods - china decorated with Venetian scenes, veduta, etc - amid the masses of plastic gondolas or miniature campanile but only rarely produced with the quality of local craftsmanship experienced by the Grand Tourists.
The word souvenir derives from the French, meaning memory or to recall. Any thing, one could argue, has the potential to be a souvenir. A lone pebble selected from a beach made up of millions can serve as the most powerful prompt to an affectionate memory - a memento instantly calling to mind a special day or peaceful walk. Travelling through Japan I found it hard to stop collecting every disposable yet perfectly printed piece of ephemera encountered: from unfathomable shop receipts and metro tickets to charming sweet wrappers. Across Central Asia, one will often eschew the typical felt or embroidered tourist goods in favour of the curious (to the foreign visitor) and irresistible everyday products [2] spotted in markets in such cities as Tashkent or Almaty. In choosing to keep a single object to remember the ubiquitous becomes rare and, thereby, special.
Souvenirs say as much about their owner as they do about the place they represent and the meanings ascribed to souvenirs and the act of interpreting and collecting such objects is varied. For some it is an ironic statement, the easy purchase of a fun or whimsical object that is a quick and cheap reminder of a brief trip or enjoyable place. For others, souvenirs are objects that perform as touchstones of meaning enabling one to construct a sense of self. They can evoke powerful memories of experience and mediate our sense of place, enveloping the past within the present [3]. Such recalled memories can also locate the individual in a certain place at a certain time whether they have travelled there or not. Souvenirs are often bought as gifts for friends or loved ones and as such do not signify the owners own experience but one that is lived through another or through emotional fantasy and longing for a place that, eventually, may be visited. They can also denote a sense of collective belonging as well as personal memory. The souvenir allows the collector to convey their cultural knowledge, a shared interest in and ability to travel, or their social identity to the world at large. To understand the significance of such things one only needs to think of the souvenirs people surround themselves with at their desks or the way in which residents new to a country often have on show keepsakes of their cultural heritage to remind them of home.
In his book Culture is Everywhere, design historian Victor Margolin introduces his Museum of Corn-temporary Art. A collection of corn-temporary objects from popular culture that, he argues, occupy a new category in material culture. In this defence of the over-looked and everyday, artefacts and ephemera in the book are organised into conventional museological departments. The fictitious museum contains departments of Decorative Art, Design, and Fashion and, notably without precedent, a Department of Souvenirs. Margolins unique publication presents a critical interpretation of souvenirs and other examples of popular material culture, from the mass-commercialization of art imagery to the sexually caricatured representations of women. He feels that such objects have much to contribute to the cultural milieu, and, in borrowing words from the scholar Stephen Greenblatt, finds they are works filled with resonance and wonder. "By resonance" Greenblatt writes "I mean the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged...By wonder I mean the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks...to evoke an exalted attention [4]." The humble souvenir manifests this response from some in the form of the idealised charm of a snow-filled globe or the reproduction of a famous artwork. For others, it may be the craft, food or drink of a particular locale that elicit such pleasure.
Some of the authors most interesting, and debatable, points examine the tension between fine and popular art and, therefore, high and low culture. Souvenirs are produced almost entirely without authorship. When referenced or reconceived by fine artists the souvenir is, Margolin argues, re-contextualised as fine art [5] and becomes, therefore, the product of an artist, its original meaning marginalised for their greater creative ambition. On their own terms - symbolic, cultural, aesthetic - these anonymous objects do not usually merit consideration in such a high-culture context. Some institutions, such as Londons Museum of Everything, do seek to celebrate artists who operate outside of the realms of the established art world and whose work often embraces objects that belong to popular or low culture. Peter Blake recently showed at the Museum of Everything and is one of the few artists to cross the high/low art divide with ease. Other, more venerated establishments have also enthusiastically examined popular culture iconography and its legacy in material culture, notably the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In 2006, for example, the mythic image of Ernesto Che Guevara, as immortalised by photographer Alberto Korda, was dissected as an enduring and appropriated symbol of everything from political revolution to radical chic through the presentation of everyday objects and souvenirs. It is not the task to discuss the appropriateness of appropriation or the benefit of creating new museums for the study and collection of such objects here. But for the purposes of the souvenir workshop it is interesting to note that, while artists are interested in these material manifestations of a culture, designers continue to display a significant lack of interest in the world of souvenirs despite their obviously rich potential.
In the 1990s designers Constantin and Laurene Boym - always interested in appropriation and the social meanings of everyday designed objects - embarked on a set of designs for souvenirs, which emulated their archetypal mass-manufactured style and form. Missing Monuments, their first collection, is a series of cast bonded-bronze miniature replicas of famous unrealised projects - from the Seven Wonders of the World to the utopian projects of the Russian avant-garde. Later collections gave us buildings of disaster (from Chernobyl to the site of political scandal at Watergate) and proposed souvenirs for the end of the Twentieth Century - small busts immortalising key figures of the modern movement. In 2000 several objects from the Buildings of Disaster series were displayed simultaneously, and in considerably different contexts, in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and American Craft Museum. Victor Margolin may find the Boyms high-jacking of such objects problematic but one has to recognise that the designers mission is a necessary one.
In showing us architecture that never was, or by conceiving of monuments to disaster, the Boyms challenge the very nature of the icons that speak of our (arguably homogenous) national identities or that endure in our collective consciousness. Their designs call for a new emotional engagement with the genre of souvenir design through the reappraisal of its subject matter and communicative potential - they insist on new icons reflecting todays world. For decades, even centuries, monuments of (now) iconic status have found their way into the moulds and presses of souvenir manufacturers. Continual demand has resulted in evolving meaning. The Eiffel Tower, for example, was once a symbol of engineering and technological triumph completed for the 1889 Worlds Fair and to mark the then centennial celebration of the French Revolution. It is now used to communicate all things French - a diluted global icon, signifying everything from boulangeries to Parisian chic, rather than the symbol of economic progress and political commemoration it once was.
Although icons that transmit such identities have to be replaced slowly, it would seem. In 2010 the World Expo took place in Shanghai, China. Countries gathered, each erecting a building with and in which to symbolise their nation, culture and twenty-first century values. The architect Bjarke Ingels was selected to design the Danish Pavilion and produced an organic swirl of punctured white cladding housing a wide ramp leading from its top to the inner sanctum below. Over 70 million expo visitors, 94% of which were Chinese, were invited to cycle (a pastime shared by both the Danes and Chinese) down the ramp to discover the treasured icon placed inside: Copenhagens, and apparently Chinas, beloved Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid story is Denmarks most well-known icon and biggest cultural asset in China: it is the story most Chinese associate with Denmark and, perhaps, one of the few aspects of Danish culture familiar to the Chinese general public. The Danes, in wishing to present a new image of their country to a nation familiar only with historic literature, deployed a subtle and clever strategy, representing both nostalgia and progress simultaneously. A potent cultural symbol that would resonant with Chinese audiences was hidden, jewel-like inside a new expression of the countrys current prowess in sustainability, architecture and the built environment. As a gesture to the residents of and visitors to Copenhagen who may have missed their cherished icon, Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei made a film about the Little Mermaid that was shown at its usual site in the Danish city for the duration of the Expo. What is interesting about the project is the way in which the architect has pushed the representation of a culture towards something more appropriate for here and now, utilizing historic iconography to do so.
In other countries the subjects chosen for depiction in souvenirs reflect the reality of contemporary life much more directly. A friend of mine owns a peculiar souvenir made and bought in Lagos, Nigeria. It is a small object made of carved wood and depicts the arbitrary moment of standing in line for a visa: four men (similarly attired but each wearing a different hat) stand patiently waiting to be seen by a jovial-looking man inside and small, and plainly made, booth. We know it is a queue for visas as the booth has a splendidly large sign - VISA it shouts, in capital letters and contrasting dark wood. It is a beguiling piece and poses intriguing questions as to its meaning. The owner tells me it was made by local craftspeople to sell to tourists at the beach and is likely to be an amusing observation on daily life in the city. Is it a wry comment? Was it made to enforce an outsiders stereotypical view of the locals? Or perhaps it is an honest reflection on the matters that occupy the average Nigerian in the metropolis? It is all of these things at once, depending on who is interpreting the object and how they are choosing to do so. For me, it communicates an intriguing message, both complex and funny. It is not quaintly folkloric as some handicrafts are, nor is it culturally banal; instead it is loaded with ambiguous meaning but definitely a product of its locality.
In Britain, organisations such as Common Ground are seizing the moment to push for better quality souvenirs as part of a larger campaign to promote the value and importance of local distinctiveness. Their Producing the Goods: Souvenirs in Particular pamphlet sets out a manifesto for souvenirs that should be: unique to a locale; true to their place, full of meaning and reinforcing identity; and produced nearby. The manifesto also champions the need for better craftsmanship, use of local materials and conceptual and material authenticity, all of which, in their view, generates positive feedback into the local community. The efforts of Common Ground and similar groups - the slow food movement in Italy, for example - have helped to turn consumer focus back to the local, sustainable and meaningful. In recent years such values have emerged in the production of, not only souvenirs, but a wealth of other designed goods. In an increasingly homogenous world, tangible products implicitly connected to a place and its people are vital: for economic prosperity, for the preservation of traditional skills and heritage, to aid global cultural communication and to celebrate diverse identities.
Some of these objects may find their way onto our mantelpieces, into an ethnographic museum or knowing display at an urbane museum of design. Most of the mass-market products sold as tourist souvenirs are often, however, perceived as valueless and tawdry - unworthy of consideration as expressive forms of material culture. For the workshop at Fabrica, it is this form of the souvenir - readily available, cheap, generic and mass-produced - we were interested in exploring. What meaning do they hold for the some-time consumer or avid collector? Why do certain souvenir archetypes - those utilising national iconography, or cultural and social stereotype - persist? How does a community or locality assert itself in the face of globalised cultural erasure? And, as there clearly are design opportunities in this sector of the tourist industry, what shape might new souvenirs take in the twenty-first century?
Designers are, by their very nature, innately interested in the material world. They interrogate how objects are made, how those objects communicate, what they communicate and why. In a genre so ripe for new ways in which to express, capture and contain memory and cultural experience, it is time for designers to rethink their ambivalent relationship with the humble souvenir. The students at Fabrica have made an excellent start. Their nascent ideas point to an expanded view of the conventional souvenir object, augmented by technology; of what cultural characteristics might truly reflect a place or people; and the question of whether memories recalled need always be good. In the words of Constantin Boym "the world needs a lot of souvenirs - for cultures sake.[6]
[1] It was during this time that the word tourist was coined.
[2] During trips to Uzbekistan I purchased, for example, tools used to perforate the top of traditional Uzbek flatbread before baking. The pins are arranged in decorative patterns, most commonly flowers or concentric circles and other geometric motifs. They can be found in any market throughout the country.
[3] Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard On souvenirs and metonymy: Narratives of memory, metaphor and materiality in Tourist Studies, Sage Publications, London, Vol 5 (1) April 2005 p29-53
[4] Victor Margolin Culture is Everywhere: An introduction of the Museum of Corn-temporary Art in Culture is Everywhere Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2002 P12
[5] Ibid., P9
[6] Constantin Boym For Culture's Sake in Curious Boym Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2002 P73
Catherine Ince, Curator, Barbican Art Gallery
Catherine studied art and design history before completing the Kingston University/Design Museum Masters in Curating Contemporary Design. Her first project for the Barbican Art Gallery was Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, a major retrospective of contemporary high-fashion from Japan organised and curated in partnership with Akiko Fukai and the internationally renowned Kyoto Costume Institute.
Prior to joining Barbican Art Gallery Catherine was Acting Director of the British Council’s Architecture, Design and Fashion department where she organised touring exhibitions and international collaborative projects and events. Her first project for the British Council was the London showing of Import Export and Global Local at the V&A – a group of companion exhibitions exploring international fusion in design in the design languages of Britain, India, Finland and Australia. As Assistant and Co-Commissioner, Catherine organised the British Pavilion exhibitions at the 2006 and 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Until 2005 Catherine was a curator in Contemporary Programmes at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where she organised exhibitions and events focusing on contemporary design practice. She has also worked as a research consultant and project manager for a range of public sector bodies and commercial companies including the regeneration and public art units of Sheffield City Council, London department store Selfridges Ltd. and graphic designers Studio Myerscough.
For further information:
Fabrica Press Office
fabrica@fabrica.it
tel. +39 0422 516349
fax. +39 0422 516347
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31020 Catena di Villorba, Treviso
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