Verbindungsstücke – Tsunagu Mono Gatari

With the exhibition “Connecting Pieces – Tsungagu Mono Gatari” the Goethe-Institut celebrates the tenth anniversary of the artist residency Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto in April 2022. On this occasion, curator Michael Hirschbichler invited the approximately 130 residents to submit a “connecting piece” for the exhibition, which establishes an associative and at the same time concrete connection between the artistic processes and the encounters on site.

For the design of the catalog, the two Berlin typographers Toshiya Izumo and Ferdinand Ulrich chose a playful, unconventional approach to the different reading directions of the two languages. On 73 artists’ cards and in the 60-page accompanying booklet, the bilingual texts are finely coordinated typographically. The cards are held together by a sleeve and protected by another cover sleeve. Both cuffs and the booklet cover bear different colors, which only gradually emerge when the booklet is unveiled. Daniel Klotz has processed the covers in two colors using the letterpress process in his Berlin workshop “Die Lettertypen”.

With this publication, Wasmuth & Zohlen Verlag continues its nearly 100-year association with Japanese culture, which had its first high point in the 1930s with the publications of Tetsuro Yoshida’s volumes on the Japanese House (1935), the Japanese Garden, and Japanese Architecture (1954f) and, with the two bestsellers on Wabi Sabi, continues to the present.

The exhibition at CLB Berlin will be opened by Johannes Ebert, Secretary General of the Goethe-Institut, on April 28, 2022 and will be on view through May 15. Digitally, the exhibition is available here (https://www.goethe.de/ins/jp/de/sta/kyo/10v/vbs.html).

Product photos © Norman Posselt 2022