During my MA degree course in graphic design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts I made the magazine called "Holobiont", which is a term derived from biological science, meaning a complex organism that is alive because it is composed of thousands of smaller organisms that work together. One could call a human being a type of holobiont, but involves an uncomfortable shift in thinking about human agency. This project was conceived out of a concern about climate change and is an attempt to organize and understand the phenomena that resulted from it. It's both a personal artistic statement and a humanistic research project, an anthology of cultural texts that analyze the human-nature relationship from different points of view. The format of the work is 280×395mm, ten copies were made, each of them hand sewn and bound with a screen printed cover.
The design premise is to create tension through the juxtaposition of Gutenbergian interpretations, block typography, and organic illustrations inspired by biological forms. When it comes to graphics I utilized repulsive photographs of bacteria, tissues and infested entrails (open sourced photographs from veterinarian archives). I often played with scale - tiny sketches were enlarged to a large format, which created an interesting effect both visually and metaphorically. The purpose of the effect is a meeting between an encyclopedia of natural history and a counterculture zine, printed on a cheap duplicator.
The magazine is entirely edited, illustrated and designed by me. I began working on it by creating a mind map, which I systematically completed over a year. The intellectual basis of the project is the philosophy of "Dark Ecology" by Timothy Morton, in it he assumes that in order to think ecologically, we should reject the romanticized ideal concept of nature and accept its dark, disturbing and sometimes disgusting facet.
Additionaly I created an experimental animation to convey an idea of biological metamorphosis.
Thank you.
