France's premier graphic design festival returns for another year, this time with one eye fixed firmly on the past as it continues to celebrate the best student and professional work. It’s mid-May, and that means Chaumont’s annual International Poster and Graphic Design Festival is once again almost upon us. Having been staged between May and June every year since 1989, the festival is now one of Europe’s most significant graphics-focused events. Though there is a clear effort to push native practitioners, the French festival presents the best work from the rest of the world across the town’s multiple venues, such as Les Silos, Espace Bouchardon and the Chapelle des Jésuites.
Alongside its three globally recognised competitions — the International Poster Competition; the “Students – All to Chaumont!” Competition; and the recently added French Selection — which are the denouement of the festival, Chaumont is also renowned for its extensive program of lectures, workshops and exhibitions. Though as progressive as ever, this year's festival pays particular attention to the past, not only because it is the 25th instalment of the event, an appropriate anniversary on which to reflect, but also in recognition that 2014 is the centennial year of World War One.
As such there will be a retrospective display of previous International Poster Competition winners, from Gunter Rambow to Kirill Blagotatskikh, while graphic design historian Michel Wlassikoff has curated an exhibition titled Signs of the Great War, exploring the role that the graphics disciplines played in that conflict and their evolution at the beginning of the modern movement. Elsewhere, graphic designer Mathias Schweizer and designer Dimitri Mallet’s exhibition, Living Space, uses the familiarity of the domestic environment to test the various modes of influence now open to practitioners in their field; and in This is not a Wild Card studios Åbäke, Dexter Sinister and Our Polite Society will all respond to the physical and metaphorical context of the Chapelle des Jésuites as an impetus to work.
The highlights of this year’s student-focused workshops include Christèle
Selliez-Vandernotte’s cyber-punk inspired optical experiments; Colophon and The Entente leading a team in developing a new font for a signage system to be used in the town; and artist and writer Will Holder’s investigation into the relationship between typography and cultural categorisation. Notable speaking events, such as the round table How / Should graphic design be taught? and the When designers are artists debate, add an important discursive element to proceedings.
Chaumont Design Graphique
Chaumont, France
17 May - 9 June, 2014
cig-chaumont.com