Geringonça — Sesc Rio
Geringonça, Redemoinho Artístico is a Sesc Rio project that gives space and oportunity for young people all around the city to present their talents in plastic arts and cinema, to perform music, poetry and theatre, and to discuss subjects concerning their reality. Their HQ is in Sesc Tijuca, where most of the events take place frequently.
At first the Geringonça team asked Tecnopop to do their first institutional publication, their first appearance in print. The first meeting was in January 2006, and me, Theo Carvalho and Tatiana Saback were responsable for this project. They told us about the range of the project, how many anual events they promoted, and how many young people participated and coordinated their own activities. It was a spontaneous and self-perpetuated movement by then, indicated somehow by the name; geringonça is a huge complex although precarious and uncomprehensible machine, that we cannot control and seems to work by itself.
So, the anual print we discussed to do should reflects the project’s messiness. Knowing that the run should be small, the idea was to produce “unique copies”, so to say, varying randomly the relation between the images and the text. But how to do it? First of all, me and Theo convinced Tecnopop to adopt a two steps printing process: printing first all the image’s spreads, then shuffling the spreads, and finally printing the text in the right sequence. This way we would have different background images for each part of the text.
This pressuposed that we would have images in all spreads, what was already decided by then. Only thing to notice was that none of the original images had enough resolution to go on press, not even on small sizes: they were amateur material provided by the same young people from the project, and this was significant. Some of the images were small video captures. The solution was to make it bigger, and stretch the images until their noise become a plastic atribute. We enlarged it until the spread was 60 × 45 cm – that’s another meaning for geringonça: something so big or heavy that you cannot carry.
To ensure that the encounter between image and text by chance would always work we “killed” the white from the images by using a raw brown recycled paper, and saved it for the text that would come over as a special white offset printing ink. We worked very close to Sidnei Balbino, our graphic producer, to conceive this design – he was a crucial advisor, and at the end we together chose the silk screen process for the text, staying still inside our budget, even with the messy handling process.
Due to the size of the page, we picked a thick paper, and structured the object using only its forty pages and staples, no cover or binding. It was good: it weighted like a geringonça.
As a way to stay true to the concept me and Theo decided to “blind” compose the text, without having any image as a background reference, considering that the text spread could appear over any image spread. There were two files, one for each process.
The presentation was good, but raised a lot fears, after all this was a bold design. And for the next months, while the text was being finished, the Sesc Rio board on this project changed more than one time, and some decision went back and forth; we reached the limit of doing almost another project (a small vulgar 4/4 magazine in Couché, which coasted more!), and went back again to the original concept, and by then, me and Theo were already tired of arguing in favor of the project. I think the final result suffered with the stress.
Sadly Tecnopop didn’t monitor the production, this remained Sesc Rio’s responsability, and so, unfortunely, they didn’t shuffle the image spreads during the process, despite our design. All the copies went out the same.
2006 @ Tecnopop
300 × 450 mm
40 pp in Portuguese, no distinct cover
typeface: Auto
Offset and silk screen
