Lucio Passerini teaches at Cfp Bauer, a design school with a long tradition in Milan, with James Clough and Luca Barcellona, among others. Every year they design, set and print a book with their students. For last year’s project they decided to gather a collection of ephemeral prints exploring different techniques. I asked Passerini to tell me more about the intriguing project.
Passerini: I proposed a narrative backbone: to tell the story of a fictional typographer, inspired by Max Aub’s novel “Jusep Torres Campalans”—the biography of a fictional painter who “lived” in Paris with Picasso and Braque—and since we had just lost a friend typographer, Piero Oberti, who ran a small print shop in Milano, we decided to dedicate this project to his memory.
So, pretending to have found a box filled with documents in his abandoned workshop, I wrote the amazing story of Oberto Petri, our unrecognized hero who started his career setting a poem for Hugo Ball, then moved to Parma to study Bodoni and fight the ascent of fascism, then to Verona to work with Giovanni Mardersteig, eventually to Milano, where he inspired the young Massimo Vignelli! A circumstantial biography, signed Pierina Colussi, the anagram of my name.
Our students have designed and printed the array of printed matter that constitutes the “Dossier OP 2015.” It has been great fun.
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