It has been said that typography is the architecture of thought.

We build sentences from words and letters that we combine into endless messages communicated through various media. In the same way that the alphabet gives form to speech, the “movable types” of the printing press gave materiality to the word enabling the circulation of printed matter across time and space.

Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of a rhinoceros from 1515 remains a suggestive example of the intersection between oral and printed accounts. Inspired by the story of Genda, a rhinoceros that traveled from India to Portugal before going down with the ship carrying it further to Italy as a gift to the Pope, Dürer’s rhino also traveled far. Even if it was constructed only from hearsay, Dürer’s cut imprinted itself in the minds of European artists and historians for many years to come.

For the exhibition “Verba Volant, Scripta Manent” (“(spoken) words fly away, written ones remain”, a Latin proverb from the 1st Century), the artists, educators, graphic designers and publishers Benjamin Savi and Wilfred Wagner have selected works that revolve around questions of form, media, and signification addressed through material interventions.

A thread running through the works is Savi and Wagner’s employment of sign vinyl, a material used widely on store windows. The preparation process involves a translation from a static shape to a digital rendering of points and vectors which can be manipulated endlessly. The decals allow for a material reduction into pure shape even if its initial effect is enlargement for the purpose of communicating a message. In their work, the foil has an ambiguous function that testifies to the artists’ idiosyncratic use of graphic tools.

Wagner’s works consist of a series of steel plates wrapped in foil with enlarged notes that accompanied an industrial paper cutting machine, adjusted to the size of the standardized IKEA plates, while Savi’s foil sign, standing on the floor of the exhibition, presents a wavy line on lined paper. The sign resembles handwriting worksheets from elementary school just as it represents a 1:1 replica of the light box the foil was originally produced for. Savi expanded the original sheet to make it match the site-specific light box at the exhibition space in Rome, whereas in the current exhibition the foil becomes the standard for which a new box has been created. Instead of an illuminated sign framing the exhibition, the sign rather becomes a signature. It acts as an example of the repositioning and repurposing of forms and formats that run through both artists’ practices.
For the past two years, Savi and Wagner have served as the exhibition committee for the Danish Printmakers Association and put together the exhibition program for 2024 and 25. Their work in selecting and compiling the program, as well as their shared language about graphic techniques and practices, is reflected in the presented works, which are excerpts from processes and collaborations that have taken place over the past several years.

Savi and Wagner’s practices revolve around the collection, processing and distribution of printed material – but also about investigating and experimenting with the possibilities of graphic tools as ways of gathering and making public. They describe the works as “graphic translations of found material that touches on printmaking as a pedagogical tool”. The pedagogical practice can be seen as an exercise in how to continue and transfer experience and knowledge about graphic techniques and at the same time hand over the tool to the student themselves, so that they can make their own experiences. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues in the book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), referring to the enlightenment figure Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840), the teacher’s most important task is to encourage the student to learn for themselves, just as they have at some point learned to speak; through imitation and comparison. The teacher’s explanations of, for example, a text insert an unnecessary distance between the student’s ability and the teacher’s supposed or alleged knowledge. Instead, it is the teacher’s method that can be a model for imitation:

“The student must see everything for himself, compare and compare, and always respond to a three-part question: what do you see? what do you think about it? what do you make of it? And so on, to infinity. But that infinity is no longer the master’s secret; it is the student’s journey.”[i]

From 1965-68, Sister Corita Kent developed a rulebook for The Immaculate Heart College Art Department that encourages the continued questioning of the familiar, rather than the standardization and reproduction of knowledge.

“Rule 7: The only rule is work.
If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.”

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[i] Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford University Press, 1991, 23.