BA Communication Design Universidad de los Andes MA Graphic Communication Design Central Saint Martins
Santiago Rodríguez Gómez Designer
+44 74 78 07 44 04 san.tiago92126@gmail.com www.4-18.org – www.carmajournal.org
Profile I’m interested in expanding the boundaries of editorial design and publishing. My practice is driven by the dynamics of the global south and how knowledge circulates and is created in these geographies, finding strategies for knowledge to emerge as a self-initiated activity between different communities. I’ve been working as creative director of 4-18 Foundation a non-profit organization since 2011 and in 2015 became head of their editorial branch. Two of the more significant projects we developed were “Proyecto Visualizacion de Honda”. The project was developed alongside academic professionals, fishermen and children from the community and cultural institutions such as the Colombian National Library and the Museum of Honda. The main goal was to achieve meeting points with the community to discuss environmental and social issues. “A Manual, How to Bribe a Cop in Colombia” was a project for the Shanghai Biennal and the Museum of contemporary art of Ming bookstore made in collaboration with Taiwanese artist Yunyu Shih, here I was in charge of the editorial design and art direction for the book. Currently, I am the Art Director of CARMA Journal the first interdisciplinary art journal from Colombia, the magazine was launched both in Bogota and London to allow knowledge to circulate between individuals of different academic spheres and geographies. I was also part of the editorial team behind Unknown Quantities a publication produced at Central Saint Martins by a collaboration of students from MA CCC and MA GCD.
Master’s Degree Final Project
This project intends to understand the educational experience of students that travelled from the Global South to the Global North pursuing a better future. This collection of stories expresses the complexity and diversity behind their motivations, their goals and expectations; They are conveyed through the use of text, sound, video and illustration and supported on the imaginaries from the tropics and the South as an exotic garden.
With this project, I mainly wanted to expand my practice as an editorial designer. I wanted to be able to push the idea of text and image as the canons for an editorial outcome by including, sound, video, and all sorts of media into one single editorial universe. Whilst I had some simple experiences with Processing in the past, I had never done any web design outside of Squarespace or Tumblr. I realised that I had to take a leap of faith by immersing myself into web design. Throughout the final stages, there was this fear that held me back, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to learn how to code and get to a point in the project where I could be proud of the outcome. I see this final outcome as a first step into developing my editorial practice more fluidly, able to grow in different paths. Instead of something that has to be defined by its form as something that can take any shape required by the content. One of the most rewarding things about this project was the feedback I received after doing the interviews. Most of the people I interviewed thought it was a great opportunity to reflect on what they had done and also where they wanted to go in the future. To offer a space where they could be listened and recognized, where they could stop for a second and reflect.
Art Direction
Publication developed during the master of Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins. Record of students reflecting on the motivations and goals behind pursuing a masters degree. Each interview is portrayed frame by frame showing the moments of doubt and reflection, overlapping visualising how this experience has changed them over time.
The 4-18 Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to cultural management. The goal of the Foundation is to promote the intercection of art practices with science and environmental issues, political, economical and gender initiatives. By means of management dynamics and the promotion of projects. For 4-18 Foundation is a priority to support, manage and spread pedagogical initiatives, publications, calls, contests, and new art practices that respond to specific contexts. It’s important that artists, public, as well as other people interested in the creation and diffusion of culture find in the Foundation a kind and supportive space that allows the construction of convergency networks around collaborative mechanisms and horizontal languages. I’ve been creative director since 2011 and have been in charge of research and development of Guide to Nowhere, CARMA, Rival and Proyecto Visualizacion de Honda. While providing support and identity & editorial guidelines to every project.
Branches from the studio
Branding
Branding developed for projects within 4-18 Foundation. Everytime we have the opportunity to create a new project we make sure that it has their own identity and that we are able to tell a new story with it.
Website
A MANUAL, HOW TO BRIBE A COP IN COLOMBIA
This book is divided into two parts: The guide and the appendix. In the guide, we provide information for the reader to identify the different stages in which bribery develops so that he or she can act accordingly at the time they face the police. We also present several case studies that help recognize the intention of a police officer to ask for a bribe as well as certain specific terminology and body language used in these situations. In the appendix, we offer a list of double sense terms that are common during bribery and some useful information about the bills used in Colombia (e.g. History and nicknames). At the end of the book, you can find thirty testimonies that provide the reader with several situations in the context that work as examples of how to use the information of this manual. This book is focused on transit violations and the testimonials occurred mainly in Bogota. However, the contents in this book can be easily applied in any other part of the Colombian territory. This book was made over the course of 6 months. We made online and paper surveys, with face to face interviews. In the end, we collected more than 600 online surveys, 200 written surveys and 150 interviews. The book was made in collaboration with the artist Yunyu “Ayo� Shih.
Art Direction
Art Direction
This magazine begins without the knowledge of any theory regarding the anthropological, psychological, structural, urbanistic, architectonical, sociological or symbolical definition of what is a place, thus we are trying to find different interpretations of what is happening there. On the other hand, we would like to emphasize those sites which are “non-specific”, sites we could consider dead or invisible but not null. It is then that which happens between places, spaces that may be considered as “non-places”, reduced from all apparent significance and waiting to be discovered. Guide to Nowhere is a hybrid between a global photography project and a tourist guide. We want to generate curiosity in the places you visit or where you’re part of and to start to explore them. In the same way as a tourist guide offers you a series of locations to consume, Guide to Nowhere, discovers that which goes further into the experience of the visitor and the resident, of what’s particular and ordinary in each place; reactivating lost spaces in an already inhabited and explored location, in order to show a new panorama from the perspectives of photographers, artists, designers, among others that will allow the revealing of intermediate places.
Previous issues: Bordeaux - 2014 New York -2015 Milan - 2015 Paris - 2015 Honda -2015 Bogota - 2016 Istanbul - 2016 Barcelona - 2016 Matsudo - 2016
Exhibition for Guide to Nowhere
This exhibition took place at the Museum of the Magdalena River in Honda and was made in collaboration with the school children from the city of Honda
El OďŹ cio del Pescador
Art Direction
This book was made out of a cyanotype workshop around fishermen and the craft of fishing in the city of Honda in Colombia. The objective of these workshops, lead by 4-18 photographer and project manager Pablo Gรณmez, was to go beyond the experimentation with a specific technic of photography and transcend it into a documentary piece. With this in mind, we decided to use different utensils and tools used by the fishermen and document them using cyanotypes. With this, we were able to give a global representation of the fishing trade. This workshop was aimed at the wives of the fishermen in Caracoli, the fishers neighbourhood in Honda, to have an intimate approach into their family and everyday life. The book is a memory of these traditional practices. Visualizing this community often overlooked in the big cities, we were able to tell part of their story. The reproductions of the cyanotypes were kept intact, our aim was for people to be able to have a glimpse of their traditions. The book also provides detailed instructions on how to make cyanotypes.
Art Direction
www.carmajournal.org
CARMA is an interdisciplinary art journal, reviewed by academic peers, with a focus on artistic research. This publication seeks to be available to all disciplines as a meeting point to build an horizontal language, which allows knowledge to circulate between individuals of different academic spheres. This initiative aims to strength and visualize the academic and research production in Colombia, bringing it closer to its peers in the world, breaking the barriers of disciplinary isolation. It is a disjunctive alternative that seeks to generate a perspectivist understanding of things. Where each form of knowledge can be compared, feedback and contradicted, seeking to understand reality from multiple perspectives. For the first issue we addressed the concept of limits from a myriad of disciplines and held launch exhibitions in Bogota and London.
This publication seeks to be available to all disciplines as a meeting point to build a horizontal language, which allows knowledge to circulate between individuals of different academic spheres. Where each form of knowledge can be compared, feedback and contradicted, seeking to understand reality from multiple perspectives. This publication is free of cost and is one of our main principles as we want to keep the circulation of knowledge available to everyone. In this first edition, the central theme is the limit, with the purpose of reinforcing the central objective of the magazine: to approach artistic research while avoiding the academic hermeticism, which observes from a comfortable position the collapse of social utopias and community. This publication contains nine articles by authors from different territories, disciplinary and artistic backgrounds, in parallel with photographic work of ten artists exploring and questioning the idea of limit from the social, territorial, architectural and political in the country.
London Exhibition
This was one of my first editorial projects, it is also the one that started to inform what I really wanted to explore with editorial design. Working closely with an artist allowed me to explore new ways of communication. This project was a real opportunity for me and also meant a great challenge. I had the opportunity to explore freely the book to re-design and re-imagine it. But still maintaining some core aspects of what the artist intended with the text. In this project I explored the concept of revelation through the darkness, it’s in the moments of more obscurity when we more desperately seek light; is under this duality that I began to build the book. What was more important about this text was that it presented some ideas about art, the academy, and the art-business in the critical perspective of a student. I was then concerned with redefining what the canons of the book were, some of the codes and aesthetics used in conventional books were used in order to remit to and eventually to rethink what they were.
Illustration: Sebastiรกn Arriaga
The texts of this book were hypertextual which meant that some phrases and paragraphs related to other part of the text and you were able to jump from one page to another.
BA Final Project
This project arises from the concern and fascination around Uncertainty. Understanding it as intrinsic to the human condition, allowing us to question what we are able to perceive. Our capacity to interpret what we observe is also linked to the way in which we communicate, language is a fundamental part of the construction of our reality. This project questions the social system that everyone that participated in it belongs to, by how each individual is able to define and understand four basic principles (Being Born, Grow, Reproduce and Dying). This project then seeks to visualize this information through an editorial space taking into account the information management and the content production as a creation alongside with the reader, understanding it as a significance producer as well. Seeking an emancipated space, free of any instrument that might limit the expression of each individual. This project question itself about the loss of the singularity around the accelerationist theory, developed by Steve Shaviro, in which he questions the effects of a political-economical neoliberal theory where the idea of progress and technological development have consumed every aspect of society including culture. The strategy to recognize the individual is “Spaces of Uncertainty� a project based on self-editing. Allowing the reader to be critical and create its own content. The possibility to configure and spread your own discourse according to your own expression.
These are some of the interventions made on the books. They were given to designers and artists becasue of their capacities to provide a visual output to their ideas and concepts.
The relation between fear and dying raised from how death it’s the only certainty in life. During the discussions, it became one of the most important engines because it generates an involuntary action, a way to need to turn our existence valuable. Fear often decides over us as a self-preserving response and it becomes an unwanted action. Obstructing the desired action but not stopping us, it is just a diversion. During the conversations, the concept that arose was False Starts, based on the idea of how we rationalize everything we do out of fear. Thus, are those little catalyzers that won’t let us act in the way we intended. This book was a visualization of the concept of False Starts in the way the photos were placed. Inside there are short texts that were related to the concept of fear, either fictional or by personal situations in which it had materialized. But in order to be able to read the book, you had to rip through the image. All of the images were from a forest 300km away from Bogota, the idea behind that was to represent the feeling of being lost without having a clear point of reference.
Fear The need to avoid an unknown path.
Showcased in Design and Design Published in Bells and Whistles: Printing With Special Effects, SANDU CULTURAL MEDIA
“Volarán“ Exhibition of the best 2013 grad projects, Universidad de los Andes February 2014 Photography by Oscar Prieto. Taken from the facebook Universidad de los Andes Architecture and Design Faculty page