Pandemic Mag - Exhausted Milk
Course:
Graphic Image Design
Lecturer:
Sonia Tasca
Year:
Second year
Students:
Sara Griggio
The brief
Design of an experimental magazine telling a personal and subjective account of the pandemic, totally unprecedented, both in terms of content and technical structuring.
“During the pandemic, the milk carton cap was the pretext for elaborating a cynical reflection on our lifestyle and its consumerist principles. What seems an innocent gesture, the pouring of a cup of milk in the morning, becomes the animal world’s silent indictment of our habits.”
Pandemic Mag - Background
1962. Ettore Sottsass is in the hospital recovering after, for weeks, doctors had feared for his life because of an unknown virus. It is here that, bored by his long stay in the hospital, he decides to follow an idea of his partner Fernanda Pivano, namely, to write a small journal, a kind of logbook of the patient Sottsass.
From a neighbor he manages to retrieve all the necessary materials: scotch tape, glue, scissors, and imagination…after all, these are the ingredients needed for the perfect fanzine and thus Room East 128 was born. Chronicle.
It is a perfect example of a proto fanzine, on the one hand light years removed from the provocative avant-gardes of the early 20th century, and on the other an early anticipatory example of those independent fanzines and magazines that would begin to circulate years later thanks to the spread of the mimeograph.
2020 will remain a year we are unlikely to forget. It will forever mark the moment when the Coronavirus entered our cities and our lives. Covid 19 is not only an enemy to our health, a threat to our society, and a problem for the global economy.
The virus is also acting as a catalyst and accelerator of change, making immediate and manifest phenomena that until a few months ago were only on the horizon.
Difficulties that were being foreshadowed in a still gradual and indefinite manner suddenly appeared in all their severity and sharpness; problems that were thought to be dealt with over the next few decades suddenly became knots to be untied within a few weeks.
The Coronavirus, then, acts as a push toward change, and compels us in every sphere to innovation, to overcoming existing patterns.
The innovation that society now urgently and absolutely needs has peculiar characteristics that in some ways differentiate it from the innovative processes of the past, from the patterns we were accustomed to.