35 ans d'affiches d'architecture 1973 - 2008
17 april - 9 may 2008
Monday to friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne
School of Architecture Civil and Environmental Engineering
Espace Archizoom - Batiment SG -
Ecublens, Lausanne, Switzerland
For 35 years, Edith Bianchi has produced posters for events staged by the School of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Her job included the responsibility for the organisation of the architectural conferences and exhibitions through which the School of Architecture presented itself to the general public. She created the posters and printed them by means of the silk-screen process herself: in this way, the events could be publicised on a large scale, while financial difficulties were kept at bay.
What is a poster? Something ephemeral, produced for a specific day, outdated on the next, and stolen one day in advance because these posters were collected to adorn students' digs and many less humble residences. The exhibition of all these posters that have appeared over the years will show both the graphic diversity of the oeuvre and that of the cultural life of our School of Architecture. Looking at them will endow all the events with a visual form which they themselves have lost.
The technical and economic limitations, the difficulties of artisanal printing forced Edith Bianchi to find make-shift solutions - to reuse motifs, almost always to redraw images to make them simpler, to find adequate types of paper, to respond to the requirements of silk-screen printing, to find out quickly what guest speakers' personalities were made up of and what the most representative images of their architectural realisations were - all this is visible in this work. Neither draughtswoman nor architect, but quite an artist.
Vernissage Thursday April 17 at 18:00