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C-Site n.1 - China and the new unstructured
C-Site is a successful experiment by Frab's. Its authors, Xuechen Fan and Maxim Corner di Ori.studio, count it among the magazines, but in reality it is there destructuring of the magazine and the pursuit of a conceptual design game.
The first impact when the package arrived from China was that of a thoughtful fear when beyond the design of the pages we saw all the characters in Chinese. To find the translation promised by the editors we had to scroll through the ten folded maxi sheets of the project to find at the bottom a pamphlet in recycled paper with a meticulous translation into English. And then our adventure began.
In the first issue, this editorial product published and printed in Beijing, China, offers us a dissertation on the concept of "new", in particular "The new is beauty before the old comes and after the old is gone" . On this theme, the authors intertwine with Asian precision the questions and answers of 10 artists, photographers, architects and designers.
The Asian precision is represented by the fact that the authors have personally composed this editorial product which has no binding as the plastic bag contains 10 interviews in very large sheets of paper, each meticulously folded with photographs, metrics and texts organically scattered around each sheet. After these 10 sheets inside a small enveloped leaflet there are photographs and biographies of the authors. The English translation follows and closes a rigid cardboard that gives structure to this completely deconstructed experiment.
You will need a large enough space to study this piece of craftsmanship. It will be here that on the topic of the new we were talking about before, the 10 interviewees start from the description of the concept and ask themselves consequential questions with which they answer the question of the first, give their interpretation and formulate a question to the second. Basically it works like this: to gives his vision on the topic, then turns to b asking him a question to which b he answers by giving his own interpretation and then formulating his own question a c.
It is a sort of interview without an interviewer that inaugurates a trend that can be defined as an "interconnected interview", without any need for a director. It does so with a number that starts from the concept of new and actually ends up surprising us and again leading us to a concept that in the new and modernity increasingly adds negative factors to the positive aspects. The main interpretation of the concept of new leads almost all the interviewees to fall inexorably on the mad rush of technology, from the internet to social networks to photographs taken in every moment of our life.
After this reading, the ambiguous sense of technological development emerges like a sinking heart, starting as beautiful almost regardless, but with hidden corners that lead us in every facet to find ambiguous meanings, dangerous for ourselves.
C-Site it left us a note of parallel dimension, a sort of upside of modernity and endless questions. It is a successful project on the graphic level and at the same time on the theoretical and conceptual level. It makes the lover of strange paper fall in love and makes the thought of those who study our age smoke.
It is a masterful dive into the knowledge of the questions that tear apart a dormant world that from afar we do not see or are not shown to us.
If you are curious, you can find it available on Frab's at this link.
Have a good trip!