OFFF Barcelona 2016: Wrap Up
For a third consecutive year, fluoro were proud media partners of OFFF Barcelona. We were once again on-ground in the sunny Spanish city giving our readers an insight into the event speakers, workshops and the unique spaces that made up the three-day cultural design event. All the elements coming together to create the renowned OFFF Barcelona atmosphere that always offers so much for all involved to immerse themselves in.
Held at the striking Disseny Hub Barcelona, the sellout event, attracted thousands of local and international visitors, everyone curious to see what other creative minds had to offer in the worlds of design and beyond.
Our OFFF Barcelona journey commenced as we handpicked the creatives we wanted to hear from and took a look into their process, inspiration and the boundaries they aimed to push. The innovation and creative spirit of these artists certainly echoed throughout the entire event.
The diversity of OFFF Barcelona never fails, and we now bring you the final highlights of the 2016 edition, showcasing the unique design perspective that OFFF Barcelona presents each year.
The first day of OFFF Barcelona saw Spanish artist Andoni Beristain present his colourful and humouros work. His POP fashion, and still life photography work tries to regularly challenge convention and in order to do so he created his own publication La Monda that serves as a portal of expression in both visual and written mediums. This intersection of media was the focus of American graphic designer Paula Scher, of Pentagram.
Scher’s main focus is directed at the practical considerations that come along with design as a means to effective communication. Many times the projects she involves herself in evolve to work in conjunction with social media and the greater public, believing that only when people interrelate and interact with design does it becomes effective. For this reason Scher admires and gains inspiration from street art, bridge the gap between artist and spectator. She also believes in the importance of maintaining a strong recognisable identity for any project by employing congruent themes and design elements.
Next, we saw Pablo Garcia. Initially mastering the craft of architecture, Garcia is an art and technology historian at heart and takes tremendous pleasure in finding parallels between classic artwork and contemporary vision. He notes that many times this is quite effective at achieving a sense of irony that can be visually pleasing. Many of his projects focus on blurring the lines between the physical space we occupy and the “virtual” space that can be imposed using techniques like anamorphic projection to create an illusion. Garcia’s recent work involved creating dynamic time-lapse extrusions with 3D printing to put a new spin on some of the classic static Bronze sculptures from history.
Executive Creative Director at New York City’s The Mill, in Rama Allen, like many creative visionaries believes in living by a code of sorts in order to achieve optimal creative results. He starts by finding one’s childlike state of “magical thinking” and then creating rituals to help maintain a feeling throughout a project. He always strives to seek out the unknown and embrace the “hunt” in order to challenge himself into forward motion. Much of Allen’s work comes from the philosophy of making the invisible tangible using biometric devices such as FMRIs that can measure and visually depict the brains activities when associated with colour perception. One such project will be premiered at this year’s Festival de Cannes and will unveil an immersive experience created with biodata.
Day two saw French videographer Danny Sangra share his quirky and witty work, which we describe as idiosyncratic, crude and often at times funny. In order to achieve the level of confidence necessary to succeed he had to overcome several early frustrations. Many of his earlier attempts at breaking into the digital industry were met with failure, which kept pushing him into other areas of creativity until he finally found his niche in film. He joked that several of his earliest short films were achieved by fabricating a sort of false hype around them in order to gain popularity in various circles. Several of his short videos became successful after online media platform Vimeo honoured them with their Staff Pick accolade.
Hiro Murai was one of the creatives that we chose to interview in an earlier OFFF Barcelona related feature where he talked about his process. Born in Tokyo Japan, Murai is now making waves in Los Angeles collaborating with some of the biggest contemporary musicians in the industry. He has made a career of creating dazzling visual effects for not only the music videos he directs but also for live musical performances. His work process focuses on elaborate refining and re-tuning throughout several stages until he is happy with the engaging final result.
“Never overlook a silly idea” is the motto of Canadian visual artist and designer James White whose work falls under the name of Signalnoise. White is a self-confessed Child of the 80’s, describing himself as using the insanity of that time period to fuel his work, objects such as action figures, hockey/baseball cards and iconic characters from TV and comics inspire him to create a childlike humour within his art. Often times in his current career he uses ideas which he drafted as a child and in so doing has created a “collaboration with himself” spanning 30 years.
Day two also saw the work of Javier Jaen, who is focused on illustration specifically for publication. Rather than taking a simplified approach to communicating visually he applies a more enigmatic complicity in order to engage his viewers. His recent work confronts issues of race, gender and antiquity theft in war torn countries.
Sound artist Kiran Gandhi, another creative we interviewed in the lead up to OFFF Barcelona, also blends two mediums harmoniously through innovative experimentation. Day 2 ended with a bang as drummer Gandhi had audience members on their feet in excitement with intense beats combined with overlaying poetry and prose. “I have learned that being present and sharing your best self in everything you do enables most moments of your life to be a medium through which you can make an impact,” Gandhi said. On stage with her was artist Joshua Davis who contributed his harmonically timed visual projections.
Day three saw 26-year-old Belgium artist Bert Dries present his graphic works Musketon. Dries quit school early on and became a self-employed vector pop artist. He found his feet by first approaching the brands he liked with outrageous ideas and through persistence found that many projects were accepted for their quirky humour. He firmly believes that people don’t buy the products, but rather the story that is being conveyed. The popularity of much of his work comes from individuals on social media whose demand helps to evolve the forms in which the ideas manifest.
Spanish tag team Diego Córdova and Martí Canillas founded their art direction and design service Córdova Canillas. Working on projects such as Fuet Magazine where food and politics combine give them the opportunity to direct illustrators and photographers in their vision of brand identity and timeless design in order to reach a variety of audiences. Córdova and Canillas spoke about how this partnership evolved as well as defining a successful delineation of objectives and tasks between the two of them as a working duo.
Armed with his creative tool of choice, the Sharpie marker, Timothy Goodman at OFFF Barcelona showed us how he has made a career out of the written word with the help of his trusty Sharpie permanent marker. Driven by the philosophies such as finding what you love and letting it kill you is his way of involving himself in the issues behind his creations. Many times he tried to reach his audience by providing positive messages and support to counter act the negativity of the world. He recently became politically involved with his project “build kindness not walls” where with the help of participants he created a typographical performance piece in front of Trump Tower. Goodman was another designer we spoke to pre-OFFF. Read the interview here.
Day Three was the final day of OFFF Barcelona, and the end of a path of creative discovery, but one that is truly unique to OFFF. Each attendee to the event received the unique ARCHETYPE book, which we and our design partner HM. feature within. We’ll have some shots from the book to share across fluoro soon.
OFFF Barcelona will continue feeding the future next year and we’ll be there to bring you new groundbreaking ideas, innovative speakers, and original creativity. Stay tuned.
Research and photography: Julian Luskin.
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