We are just planning
Topography – Typography
The next ENDEGRA meeting starts in the landscape of Middlegermany and Saxony with its vast traditions in art and culture, where printmaking has played a vital role since the 15th century. In the romantic era, that emanated in the 18th century, visual artists from the Dresden area started to paint the lovely, strange and always expressive and characteristic landscape along the river Elbe and in the Sächsische Schweiz. They depicted the outer landscape to use it as a metaphor for an inner landscape. Their art led to a widely spread appreciation of the landscape, as a physical place to visit and as pictures that told about our lived experiences.
Topography is a scientific tool to understand conditions and preconditions of an investigated terrain. As a metaphor we can use it to get a better understanding of our situation as artists and printmakers today. How would we describe the ”landscape” where we live and work as artists and printmakers? What maps do we need to draw to find our ways? What do we need to consider in the present artistic ”ecology”?
Typography, on the other hand, was always a tool to bring both intellectual and emotional knowledge. To print and to spread that knowledge we need freedom of expression and liberty of the press. We live in a society that wants to develop and deepen democracy. As printmakers, we have a responsibility: not just to save methods and tools as a cultural heritage, but to save preconditions for independent artistic language possibilities and expression. What are the preconditions of printmaking today? How can we understand, develop and defend our position as publishers of free press and independent and free art?
