Visual Communication Design Department, Shenkar

Design, Society, Culture: 3rd year seminar

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"Words Dipped in Arak" - Collaboration with Ars-Poetica and the Adi Keissar [February-June 2014]

 

Ars-Poetica is a migrant poetry reading event, hosting poets and spoken-word artists to evenings that mix poetry reading with belly dancing and party time. In the space of "Ars-Poetica" events many poets feel comfortable to read out loud poetry that explores their "Mizrachi" identity – a second and third generation of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, and protest Mizrachi poetry. (Adi Keissar, "Introduction" to Words Dipped in Arak. Guerrila Tarbut Publishers: Tel Aviv, 2013).

 

This Year the course involves collaborative work with Adi Keissar, an activist poet and the initiator of Ars-Poetica events. Through active workshops and a collaborative creative process, we explore together how poetry turns into action, how words traverse the printed page and get through to the stage and the internet, and how shifting from silent reading to activist practices as spoken word, slam-poetry and mic-check, influences the design of poetic texts.

 

The studio acts as an active laboratory for design researches that reflect the interest of the students in personal questions of identity and in contemporary practices of protest and activist poetry writing and reading. The students could choose to use their own written texts or to work with other poet's works, as a point of departure to investigate design mediation of texts. As a group we seek to explore an open question: When poetry is becoming a spatial and temporal event, how does it influence the ways in which designers can record, document, translate, interpret and distribute its traces? How can design become an autonomous act that continues the poetic action?

 

Or, in other words: The revolution will not be televised, but does it still has to be laid out in Times New Roman 12 punkt?