Six Dada Manifestos
The specific book presents six Dada manifestos, which were written in 1918. Dada was a movement that appeared during the World War I as a reaction to the irrationalism and the values that caused the war to occur. Dadaists used challenge, surprise, spontaneity, accidental, irrationalism, collectivity, anonymity and a plethora of other methods as weapons against the pomposity and "sanctity" of a culture whose very values underwent a very serious deep crisis.
As Tristan Tzara wrote:
Dada was born out of an ethical demand and a relentless will to reach the ultimate in ethics; it was born from a deep emotion that man, being in the center of all the spirit’s creations, supported his dominance over the bankrupt concepts of human essence, and over the dead things and goods that were acquired in a disgraceful way. That meant that we wished to see the world from a new perspective; we wanted to reform and test the very essence of the concepts that our fathers put forward and put into trial their own rightness.
This book "was born" out of these thoughts and is attempting to optimize in its typography and its pagination a series of techniques and methods, common to the thought and practice of Dada (the accidental, the anonymity, the irrationalism, the element of surprise, the childishness etc.).
It is an experimental, interactive edition of the above mentioned manifests in forty pages. On every two pages there is a different illustration or/and different lay out or/and different typography. It consists of the texts of the six manifests and illustrative and typographical combinations in their presentations as far as the parts are concerned characterized by aesthetic and stylistic disunion, illogical succession of legible and illegible texts, schemas and deductive illustrations.
The game between the individual and the collective is presented through interactive elements. There is a typographic poster inside the book created by geometrical symbols. The reader is called upon to unite the different colored squares, based on the numbers of the corners of the shape in order to create himself his own poster. Moreover, there is a typography collage made out of words, which is divided into three pieces that the reader may cut and create bookmarks.
The book was printed in Porto in March 2015,
in the printing office Fotomecânica Molografica S.A.
for a limited number of prints.
Four different kinds of paper were used.
Acknowledgements to Elias Marques.
