Show Us Your Type – Beirut

Show us your type is a project about typography and cities. Every now and the people in charge pick a new city and post a call for submissions. There are only few rules, the name of the city should be part of the poster design and the size of the poster is fixed to 396 px x 559 px.
Anyone with internet and some free time – or some unfinished doodles – can submit a piece. One hundred pieces are selected to be showcased on the website.

The title of the project Show Us Your Type implies that every time the project is launched a new set of typographic posters would mirror the idiosyncratic identity of a city and the culture it fosters. The virtual nature of this pseudo-gallery however brings together submissions from all over the world, as shown by the captioned work. Most of the submissions come from people who aren’t residents of the city but people who based their artwork on preconceived notions and internet searches for what that place is about and what landmarks it holds.

What is meant to be reviving showcase of handpicked typographic work ends up as a collection of imagined realities.

The latest exhibition was about Beirut. Several posters had disconnected reversed arabic characters; a result of not knowing the language and not having the Middle Eastern version of the Adobe Creative Suite. Other posters used arabic letters by layering them in a textural and gratuitous approach that fetishizes the oriental look of the Arabic script more than anything else. A lot of the designs submitted from Lebanon however, portrays Beirut as a self-destructing burning city, a response to the recent yet familiar situation.

Below is my submissions, probably a mix of all the above.

Rhizomatic identities and the need to belong

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”

-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

The following is a compilation of loosely connected ideas. It is the current state of an ongoing research and readings rather than an exhaustive essay towards a conclusive end. I will deliberately omit citing a bibliography because most of the content is not my own. It’s more of a compendium of writings by other people; collected, amalgamated and sometimes re-written, beyond just ‘referencing’. I will however try to keep track of my sources in the bibliography page.

The metaphor of Identity as strata inspired a series of posters found here.

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