J:V

Whilst in Amsterdam, Varvara and myself had the short pleasure of meeting Denny. Really nice chap, with amazing work.

This is one of my favourites.

“Per Törnberg and me were asked to do the graphics for the symposium Transformations of Public Space, which was held February 2007 in Amsterdams Stedelijk Museum CS, and organized by Lektoraat Kunst in de Publiek Ruimte. Two days of lectures by artists, politicians and theorists around the subject of changes and interventions in the open room.

This subject quickly made us want to transform public space with the poster itself. A wish that we found was not so easy to realize: There was no way to do it visually, since we didn’t want to refer too much to only one of the artists, but we also didn’t want it to become too cheesy / obvious.

After a while we got to the idea to change the public space around the posters with a special smell: Since the poster was only hung in museums, art schools and gallerys throughout the Netherlands — that means in closed rooms / private space — we decided to use the characteristic smell of gasoline, to remind people of the outside world and public space.

In the end, we also came up a ‘smelly’ design for the final poster: We created several original drawings by spraying, glueing, painting and stenceling the logotype by hand on big sheets of paper. These were photographed and combined to make a 2-layer silkscreen template out of it.

The posters were screenprinted with a special ink that was mixed with a substitute gasoline smell that we found in an odor laboratory in Amsterdam, and perfumed another time afterwards to keep the smell fresh.

When the first posters were hung, people instantly started coming to us to complain about the disgusting smell of them. An effect that made us much happier than all nice words about the looks of the poster.”