Elena Rendina, Nazareno Crea, Joe Rohrer

Awarded

Elena Rendina / Nazareno Crea / Joe Rohrer

'One Risk' (diploma work)

Graphic Design

Jury report

Earthquakes, avalanches and floods
We have be­fore us a land­scape in a par­lous state. A lit­tle vil­lage is being struck si­mul­ta­ne­ously by an avalanche, a con­fla­gra­tion, a land­slide, falling rocks, a flood and an earth­quake. Soon one nat­ural dis­as­ter or an­other will bury, swal­low up, wash away or burn the last house in this vil­lage. This hor­rific sce­nario is the start­ing point for the work called 'One Risk' by the three de­sign­ers Elena Ren­d­ina, Nazareno Crea and Joe Rohrer, who have been ad­dress­ing the his­tory and con­se­quences of nat­ural dis­as­ters in Switzer­land. The dis­tress­ing thing about the pic­ture de­scribed above is that it looks like a tourist poster at first. An image of a per­fect world, with sun­shine, moun­tain­ous land­scapes and houses with gable roofs. Just right for a pic­ture post­card. If you look at it for longer, you dis­cover one nat­ural dis­as­ter after an­other. This crum­pled land­scape ap­pears in var­i­ous ver­sions as a poster and as a book cover. Com­bined with type and graphic el­e­ments, the work draws our at­ten­tion to var­i­ous nat­ural dis­as­ters and warns us about them. So it is not just sim­ply a record of hor­ror sce­nar­ios, but in­tended as a de­vice for com­mu­ni­cat­ing risk, along­side posters, books and short films. The book is in eleven chap­ters, record­ing var­i­ous as­pects of nat­ural dis­as­ters in text and image. The de­sign­ers cre­ated a spe­cific type­face for the book. They based it on the font used for older ge­o­log­i­cal trea­tises, most of which were printed using a sim­ple plot­ter that ad­mit­ted only sim­ply and purely geo­met­ri­cally con­structed forms. Thus this lin­ear, re­duced and fine font was in­tended as a re­minder of the sci­en­tific world. The four films were all shot in-house. They rep­re­sent a kind of colour­less still life, de­stroyed and shaken out of its re­pose by a tiny in­ter­ven­tion. They in­di­cate how sim­ply some­thing can be pushed off bal­ance, even in the im­me­di­ate vicin­ity.
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Biography

Elena Rendina
Born in
1985
Education
Photographer

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also in

Nazareno Crea
Born in
1983
Education
designer HES en communication visuelle

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also in

Joe Rohrer
Born in
1979
Education
Designer FH, Studienbereich Visuelle Kommunikation,
Spezialisierung Wissenschaftliche Illustration

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