—Danne Ojeda—› Works— (www.d-file.com)

VANITAS book series | 2018

Vanitas (white and black versions), 2018.
14 x 20 x 14 cm, 660 pages.
Printed and bound in The Netherlands.
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vanitas-book.com

PAPER BRAINS. (Exhibition curation and design)| 2017

paperbrains.net

PAPER BRAINS was an interactive exhibition curated by Danne Ojeda in collaboration with Lisa Kuitert (Book and Manuscript Studies) and the Special Collections Library, University of Amsterdam.
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Dates
22.06–17.07.2017
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Place
Book & Manuscript Studies
Turfdraagsterpad 15–17, 1012 XT
Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam (UvA)
THE NETHERLANDS
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Photo credits: Stefanie Archer

1. Aletta H. Jacobs. De Vrouw. 1898 (Fragment).
2. General view of the exhibition.
3. Johannes Remmelinus. Pinax Microcosmographicus..., 1634 (Fragments).

D-SIGN-LAB (Solo exhibition)| 2015-16

D-SIGN-LAB was an interdisciplinary solo exhibition on design, pedagogy and curatorial works by Danne Ojeda, in which design dialogued with art, science and museology, among other fields. Whether as a designer, a curator or an educator, Danne exposed experimental, conceptual, and critical positions that question the role of design in contemporary society.
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Dates
03.12.2015–30.01.2016
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Place
Cervantes Institute
536/6 Na Rybnícku
120 00 Prague 2 Prague
CZECH REPUBLIC
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More on the show → Interview with Danne Ojeda
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Photo credits: Kryštof Blažek

D-SIGN-LAB was an exhibition within the context of de.sign series.
de.sign series is a graphic design lecture and exhibition event organized by four European cultural institutes and embassies in Prague – Goethe Institut, Instituto Cervantes, Netherlands Embassy in Prague and Embassy of the State of Israel.
The main goal of the project is to introduce to Czech audience designers from the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Israel.

Supported by
Embassy of the Netherlands, Prague
Cervantes Institute, Prague
Israeli Embassy, Prague
Goethe Institute, Prague
Edition Lidu Book Publishers
School of Art, Design and Media,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

DNA origami poster (D-Sign-Lab exhibition poster) | 2015-16

DNA origami poster (D-Sign-Lab exhibition poster)
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Images: DNA, D-Sign-Lab poster prototype and final posters
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Design: Danne Ojeda
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Supported by:
Embassy of the Netherlands, Prague
Cervantes Institute, Prague
Israeli Embassy, Prague
Goethe Institute, Prague
Edition Lidu Book Publishers
School of Art, Design and Media,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

The poster resembles the structure of a DNA in paper origami as it promotes the core design elements of the exhibition D-Sign-Lab which refers to a relation between art, design and science.

Translucent paper was selected not only to sustain the folded DNA origami structure, but also to be able to read the bilingual texts—Spanish and Czech at once but also apart from each other.

BstOOlK [This book is a stool] | 2015-16

BstOOlK
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Book-model after the book-stools of the installation Basic Object Of Knowledge (B.O.O.K.): The Contemporary Book and
its Model
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Design: Danne Ojeda
Photos: Marvin Tan and d-file studio

Basic Object Of Knowledge (B.O.O.K.): The Contemporary Book and
its Model
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An exhibition-installation curated by Danne Ojeda at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, CCA, Singapore.
13–16.11.2014
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Curator: Danne Ojeda
Exhibition design: Danne Ojeda and Outofstock

BstOOlK
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Design: Danne Ojeda
English texts
1900 pp, 27.5 x 24 x 28.5 cm
Edited and bound in Singapore
Full color illustrations

* B.O.O.K. | 2014

* [Asterisk] B.O.O.K. is a newspaper supplement - catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition B.O.O.K. Basic Object of Knowledge. The Contemporary Book
and its Model, held at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore,
CCA, (13–16.11.2014).
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Edited and published by: Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, CCA, and the School of Art, Design and Media, ADM, Nanyang Technological University, NTU, Singapore.
Design: Danné Ojeda

* B.O.O.K. was conceived in a form of a newspaper supplement and designed as an insert for The Straits Times and the Today’s newspapers in Singapore.

Previous editions of * [Asterisk] can be seen here

1. * B.O.O.K.. Detail.
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2. * B.O.O.K. as an insert for Today newspaper. Middle spread with poster for the exhibition B.O.O.K.
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3. Detail of * B.O.O.K. as an insert for The Strait Times newspaper.

Not Against Interpretation: Untitled | 2013–14 Click on the images for a different view

Exhibition design for the show Not Against Interpretation: Untitled, Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore.
20.07.2013–27.04.2014
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ASIA’S TOP DESIGNERS AWARD,
SINGAPORE DESIGN AWARD 2014

The exhibition Not Against Interpretation: Untitled took place at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. The exhibition presents untitled artworks by local artists. One of the main purposes of the curator Michelle Ho is to motivate the audience to title the artworks that are on display in the gallery space.

The arrow structure that is beside the artworks holds the different titles that the audience gives to the exhibited untitled artworks. This arrow structure also relates to the poster UNTITLED UNTIL TITLED (to be found below) designed for this exhibition. Blank labels are to be torn off from the poster’s line-shaft of the arrow, in order to be inserted in the arrow’s broad head structure beside the artworks in the gallery.

Untitled Until Titled | 2013–14

Poster–brochure UNTITLED UNTIL TITLED for the exhibition Not Against Interpretation: Untitled, Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore.
20.07.2013–27.04.2014
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Design: Danné Ojeda
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ASIA’S TOP DESIGNERS AWARD
SINGAPORE DESIGN AWARD 2014

UNTITLED UNTIL TITLED is a poster designed for the exhibition Not Against Interpretation: Untitled, that took place at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. The exhibition presents untitled artworks by local artists. One of the main purposes of the curator Michelle Ho is to motivate the audience to title the artworks that are on display in the gallery space.

The poster is at once an A2 poster of the show UNTITLED, and an educative guide/brochure that will help the audience in giving titles to the artworks in the gallery. It reinforces the action to be undertaken by the audience. In that respect, the message UNTITLED UNTIL TITLED appears as a form of an arrow broad head. The line-shaft of the arrow is represented by a series of blank labels to be torn off that the audience will use to give titles to the artworks in the gallery.

Amanda Heng: Speak To Me, Walk With Me | 2011

ASIA’S TOP DESIGNERS AWARD,
SINGAPORE DESIGN AWARD 2014
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GOLD AWARD, SINGAPORE DESIGN AWARDS 2012
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AMANDA HENG: SPEAK TO ME, WALK WITH ME
Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore
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Edited by: Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
Editorial design: Danné Ojeda
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English, Chinese and Japanese texts
228 pp, 18 x 25 cm
Full color illustrations
ISBN 978-981-07-0087-4

Camino a la Modernidad / The Path to Modernity: Mexican Modern Painting | 2009–10

ASIA’S TOP DESIGNERS AWARD,
SINGAPORE DESIGN AWARD 2014
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SPARK! AWARD 2014, NEW YORK, USA
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BEST ART CATALOGUE, ART BOOK WANTED INTERNATIONAL AWARD, CZ, 2013
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RED DOT DESIGN AWARD WINNER,
COMMUNICATION DESIGN, GERMANY, 2010

CAMINO A LA MODERNIDAD / THE PATH TO MODERNITY: MEXICAN MODERN PAINTING, Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore
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Edited by: Singapore Art Museum, Singapore and the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, 2009
Editorial design: Danné Ojeda
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English and Spanish texts
216 pp, 17.6 x 25 cm
Full color illustrations
ISBN 978–981–08–4221

One of the main characteristics of the modern Mexican painting is that it aims to develop a new way of seeing Mesoamerican culture, history and legacy. It does so by a pictorial language that encourages the viewer to re-evaluate both Mexican identity and the very medium of painting itself.
This catalogue focuses on the topics of painting and portraiture, and takes its inspiration from the modern maxim of installing ‘new possible ways of re-presentation’. The raw quality of the catalogue is inspired by the anti-normative tradition of painting that characterizes Mexican open-air painting schools. These schools were meant for the masses and were characterized by a spirit of experimentation. They rejected the academic prescribed manners of representing reality.

The catalogue has four sections of different sizes. This structure produces a sculptural effect that resembles a pyramid. Inspired by ceremonial Mesoamerican pyramids, such a structure was chosen as an allegory of the eternal cycle of the human/divine creation that Mexican culture has been engaged with since the pre-Columbian until modern times. The structure of the catalogue also appears as a canvas mounted on a three-dimensional frame. This effect continues inside the book, as the pages seem to come out of a pictorial frame. Words play as colours, letters and drop caps stand up as pure lines. The book and its pages perform a series of paintings.

Camino a la Modernidad / The Path to Modernity: Mexican Modern Painting | 2009–10

CAMINO A LA MODERNIDAD / THE PATH TO MODERNITY:
MEXICAN MODERN PAINTING, Singapore Art Museum (SAM),
Singapore
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Exhibition design: Danné Ojeda

One and Three Books | 2009–10

Poster for the presentation of the
homonym curatorial project
ONE AND THREE BOOKS by Danne Ojeda
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20 May 2010, 8:30pm
17th Biennale of Sydney,
Superdeluxe@Artspace
The Gunnery Building 43–51
Cowper Wharf Road,
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011,
Sydney, Australia.

Equilibrio Typeface | 2007–08

Font designed for the visual identity of Canales Advocaten.

EQUILIBRIO is based on an interpretation of the legal practice as the search for the equilibrium between elements in contradiction and tension.
The purpose was to create a balance between dynamic and stable forms. On the one hand, the characters were designed from circular and triangular forms, so, figures that denote balance, rest, stability, On the other hand, this sense of proportion is transgressed by the positioning of the angles in non-coincidental degrees of inclination, and by interrupted lines to be completed by the observer in the act of gaze.

Canales Advocaten (CI and website) | 2007–08

Font and website designed for the visual identity of Canales Advocaten.
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Exhibited at the 4th Latin-American
Design Forum 2009, Buenos Aires Argentina
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Download pdf (804KB)

The website interface is built to offer as much information as possible. It comprises two ‘equilibrated’ frames that interact with each other, either balancing the whole composition or breaking it with the help of the custom made font ‘Equilibrio’. These two frames of the interface are meant to be windows that allow the viewer seeing through as if one would be from home looking to the Dutch landscape, which highly influences individual emotions.

En mis ojos, tu reflejo | 2006

Capijn Studiereizen invitation
card series

A picture does not make the landscape. With this project I wanted to go beyond the former statement. What if a picture will become a verisimilar landscape by repeating itself as a sort of carpet made out of particles of the most precious but frightening element of Dutch landscape: water?

Agua Thin Typeface | 2005–06

Scales of Babel / Schalen van Babel | 2005

Author: Rubén de la Nuez
Editorial design: Danné Ojeda
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English and Dutch Texts
Bimaris, Amsterdam, 2005
92 pp, 12 x 21 cm,
b/w illustrations
ISBN 90-809840-1-9
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Exhibited at the 4th Latin-American
Design Forum 2009, Buenos Aires Argentina
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Download pdf (184KB)

The book is about contemporary art’s use of architectural models to visualize ideological structures. It takes as case studies artworks by the Dutch artist Constant and the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. In this respect, ‘performing architecture’ becomes the axial concept in this analysis.

The design of the book echoes this idea. It addresses the ‘white aura’ of the art gallery as the ambiance where concepts and images get ‘purified’ from their practical commitment. Using half pages for footnotes and visual historical references, the book plays itself with perspectives and space emulating an architectural mise in scène.

In such emulation, the half pages in the interior correlate the embossed line of the cover. This riddle acts as a slice of ambiguity in the purity of the surface. The plain whiteness is faintly distorted and quasi-imperceptible light tones suggest different viewpoints when the illusion of corners, roofs and other architectural elements appear as the book is browsed.

On Reproduction | 2005

Photography:
Elke Roelant
María Esther Morales
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Design and
editing:
Danné Ojeda
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59 x 83 cm

The ‘Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd’ was established as an emigrant hotel in 1921. Until 1935 this ‘passing by’ scenario hosted numerous families or individuals that were determined to go overseas looking forward to a better way of life.
Our teamwork was moved by the fact that the actual Lloyd Hotel inhabits different sociocultural pasts. Therefore, we settled a project, which focused on a relationship between the actual environment and the past of the hotel. The room number 28 was our scenario to portrait group of people that will somehow establish a suggestive presence on the historical chosen environment like if they would belong to another époque and yet to the present one, preserving a ubiquitous feeling.

The pictures taken at the Lloyd Hotel, where later appeared in a folder that I edited and designed.
In the folder the pictures are combined with stories told by immigrants that arrived to North America coming from Europe in the early twenty century. The liaison contemporary image-historical text stresses the ancient conflict of emigration/ immigration and position it as essential matter inherent to humankind despite age, gender, class or homeland.

* newspaper inserts | 2004-05 Back to latest * issue

* (Asterisk) is a cultural supplement initially conceived for the newspaper ‘El País’, in order to provide cultural news in different languages. The design is based on the possibility of ‘unfolding the grid’ of a newspaper. Hence, each column reveals a page.
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Editorial design: Danné Ojeda

* N. 2: Fashion and body language: On the influence of old and damage clothes on fashion as cultural countermovement.
Here an image is settled as index. The fragments of the image highlight the subject matter of the page.
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21,5 x 27,5 cm

In * the columns are converted into pages.
* (Asterisk) stresses that the reader has always access to a parcel of information, since it is showing from its very basis that the knowledge relies on ‘cognitive mapping’ in which language plays a crucial roll.
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21,5 x 33 cm

* N. 4: Cultural events at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.

Ojo font was created for this edition.

Body Prints | 2004-05

Photographic series
Photographic paper fine-grained matt
17,8 x 24 cm

Casa tomada (House Taken Over) | 2004

Poster folded
57,5 x 28 cm

View against the light
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Poster that takes as references the story ‘Casa Tomada’ (House Taken Over) written by Julio Cortázar, and the series of pictures ‘De construcciones y utopias’ (De-constructions and Utopias) made by Manuel Piña. It has been printed on both sides, two different situations and approaches to contextual realities to illustrate a personal view of what they both have in common.

Design by Subtraction | 2004

The black version (Black text)
Sizes: 2 A4/ 2 A5/ 4 A6 formats
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The poster is based on the homonym text ‘Design by Subtraction’ written by the Swiss designer Ruedi Baur. Fragments extracted from this text refer to the need to subtract oneself from the social sphere and its conventional legacy, in order to carry out socially committed design.

The white version. Size: A2 (Fragment, 2nd edition printed in 2013)
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By printing white ink on white paper the message is only readable when approaching to the posters. It becomes a very intimate message acting as a whisper. This procedure leads to a kind of trompe l’oeil, since from far away the white poster resembles just an A2 blank paper. Just by getting closer the viewer discovers a visual interpretation of the ‘subtracting’ method proposed.
The poster is also a reminder of the painting ‘White on white’ by Kazimir Malevich.

Ojo Font | 2004

The font Ojo (Eye) was built for * N. 4: Cultural events at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games to replace the character ‘O’.
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In the evolution of the alphabet, there are studies that verify how the Egyptian hieroglyphic representing an eye transformed, through different cultures and their interpretations, into the current Roman character and phoneme. This last state materialized during classic Greek times.

The replacement act tries to re-contextualize the semantic function of the Egyptian ‘eye’ within the Olympic games of modern age, as it was seen in its heydays: the sight of the Horus falcon as a symbol strength, healing and protective power, beauty, among other meanings. Thus, the intention is to return those qualities — which are also part of the Olympic spirit — to the place where they disappeared to become just a phonetic character.
Further on, it is an experiment to evaluate how much an image converted into font can affect or enrich legibility.

Font application.
More examples can be viewed here.

Diagonal. Essays on Contemporary Cuban Art | 2003

Author: Danné Ojeda
Graphic design: Danné Ojeda, André Heers (with thanks to Annette Stahmer)
108 pp/ 157 x 234 mm/ Full color illustrations/ ISBN 90-72076-18-4
DANIEL GIL PRIZE: The book was nominated for the Daniel Gil Prize for Editorial Design in the category ‘Book Designs’. This prize is awarded by ‘Revista Visual’ Blur Ediciones, (Barcelona, ES), magazine specialized on graphic design and visual communication.
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Exhibited at the 4th Latin-American
Design Forum 2009, Buenos Aires Argentina Download pdf (184KB)

The publication deals with certain Cuban avant-garde artistic practices, especially in the eighties and nineties. The volume is concerned with the dilemma of Art vs. Institution; the transcendental aim related to collective emancipation and the social artistic communication conflict linked to therapeutic and utopian gestures. The book includes examples of the practices of ‘Galería DUPP’, Henry Eric Hernández and Carlos Garaicoa, who are relevant characters within the so-called ‘New Cuban Art’.

The cover refers to the act of documentation, classification and representation as the final fate of those projects meant as ephemeral rituals of social healing. Therefore, the use of the ending of a photographic negative, which also looks like a plaster for a wound. For the same reason, the kind of stickers used to classify negatives are utilised to title the different parts of the book.

A Weapon of Mass Distraction | 2002

Video Stills
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Video that addresses the abuse of television consumption, through the paradoxical and humoristic humanization of the TV object.
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The very same human organ that allows us to visualize the phenomena and grasp nature in its wide sense is nowhere being watched.

The eye on TV screen resembles a kind of cyclopean figure: omnipotent. But, at the same time it becomes a sort of organ-ism with an individual life, that moves and reacts like a paramecium does, while it performs and refuses to be looked at.
When this organ-ism expands itself — when the eye is opened — it contains part of the world that is watched at; in its one cell (in the iris of the eye you can see reflected a little room with its window), and this apprehension of limited areas and forms intends to be a metaphor of how human beings are always confronted with partial information, and see the world through an specific and individual prism.

I was always intrigued by those one cell micro-organisms that can only be seen through specific devices. The TV set acts here as a ‘microscopic’ instrument that confronts the spectator with one cell of information, or better to say to oneself interpretation of information: to a sort of one-cell-organ-ism.