thonik

POWER

Interview with Thomas and Nikki for the POWER exhibition in Shanghai

Thomas Widdershoven and Nikki Gonnissen’s design agency, Thonik, is one of the foremost representatives of Dutch design. Its style is clean, bright and bold, with vivid colours and a strong conceptual impact. The agency has undertaken important commissions in the cultural sector and, as well as major museums, its clients include the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) and the municipality of Amsterdam.

How did this exhibition in Shanghai come your way?
China Contemporary, an exhibition of Chinese avant-garde architecture, art, graphic design and fashion, was staged in Rotterdam in the summer of 2006. We were responsible for the communications and the catalogue, and we went to a meeting where we met many of the people involved. Later a group came to our studio in Amsterdam and it turned out to be a fantastic encounter. Back in China this group told Gong Yan, a curator and artist who is director of the O Art Center at Fudan University in Shanghai, about our work, and that’s how it happened.

So what struck the spark between you and the Chinese avant-garde?
We found we were on the same wavelength in terms of irony, concept and communication. To give you an example: in the same way young designers in China are recycling the past by putting Mao on T-shirts as a fashion icon, we’ve reintroduced the communist star on an image of a tomato for the SP campaign. This star combines different meanings in an unorthodox way. In Christianity, the star is a sign of hope and of the future. As a communist symbol, the star stands for an emotionally charged past. In adverts for Heineken the star means quality. It’s really great to see that designers from totally different cultures have the same liberating sense of irony and share one another’s design strategies.

What’s your position in the Dutch design landscape?
We’re culture lovers and culture pro-ducers and we try to relate to the history of graphic design. We work mainly for museums, but we also have two large projects in the public domain.
This combination is highly unusual anywhere, including the Netherlands. The two projects in the public domain, the campaign for the Socialist Party and the municipality of Amsterdam’s new visual house style, stem from personal involvement: Amsterdam because it is our city, and the SP because the Netherlands has sailed into strange political waters since the murders of the politician Pim Fortuyn and the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. By simplifying the municipality of Amsterdam’s visual communications and making them clearer, more transparent and more powerful, we are clarifying the authorities’ role and position of power in the public domain. The government is accountable for one third of our economy. What concerns us with the SP is to boost the visibility of one of the contributors to the political debate so as to strengthen the accessibility and vitality of the political debate as a whole. That’s how we’re doing our bit for democracy.

Your work is often regarded as typically Dutch, by which people mean attractive and effective, with a clear concept conveyed with the minimum of means. Do you agree with that as a label?    
Certainly. But we also have an anarchic side to us and we regard each project as a chance to experiment. That’s typically Dutch too. The Netherlands is a small country with limited influence, so, as we can’t be strong, we have to be smart. We think this explains Dutch design’s strong conceptual bias.

What are you showing in Shanghai?
Curator Gong Yan suggested taking power as the theme. Our work is at the interface of advertising and design and is certainly a strong player in the visual domain. And Gong Yan had seen the 25 posters for Queen Beatrix’s silver jubilee. The queen with her square shoulders, her large hat and her symbolic power is an unexpectedly exotic image for people whose image of our country is based on ideas of the polders, Protestants, the landscape, the reclamation of land from the sea and the oldest democracy in Europe. Ultimately it came down to three aspects of power: political power, symbolic power and visual power. Intriguing, because this totally appropriate angle is new for us.

How do you put on a good exhibition about graphic design?
We have seldom seen an exhibition in which new, interesting images are made with the aid of printed matter. Usually all you get are folders in display cases and posters on the wall. Although we couldn’t get away from display cases, which we designed ourselves, we wanted our work in this other museum context to have a new expressive power all of its own. The challenge here was to translate essentially worthless printed matter into something valuable and unique. This is a logical progression of the way we work, as when we extended the original idea for the SP, the red tomato, to different media, modifying it to get the effect we wanted.
We decided to do an installation with hand-knotted woollen carpets.
One of the reasons for this is that an old carpet culture still exists in China and at the moment the avant-garde is taking an interest in it. In our own culture carpets have been associated with prestige, status and power for centuries. The carpet is more than an adornment in the residences of queens and emperors; in the past, the people hung carpets from the windows of their houses to welcome the monarch as he made his state entry into the city.
In the transition from printed matter to carpet we changed or omitted a number of elements if they were too specifically connected to the original location. Of course, there were some that we were able to reuse, such as the crosses from Amsterdam’s coat of arms and the ‘What’s Left?’ slogan. This once adorned the SP carrier bag and, even on a carpet, it is immediately recognizable as a part of the SP campaign, but in China it has its own implications, particularly where the threatened carpet culture is concerned.
Building on these elements, we have created a large installation, with 25 portraits of a queen becoming older by the year on one side (symbolic power), and photographs and originals from the SP campaign on the other (political power). Between them are sixteen display cases and sixteen carpets on the floor (visual power). Literally and figuratively the carpets bridge the space between monarch and people, between the portraits of Queen Beatrix and the SP’s tomatoes.

Have you ever staged a large exhibition in the Netherlands?
No, this is the first retrospective of our work and we’re proud of it. The exhibition is going on tour and it will be seen in the Netherlands in due course.