1993 and 2009

Mamco — Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva

We were approached by director Christian Bernard even while the future Mamco in Geneva was still in the planning stages. This allowed us to develop our visual language in tandem with the evolution of this emerging space and the vision of its director, who wanted a genuine back-and-forth between us. Several guiding principles emerged from his initial curatorial vision: working repeatedly with the same artists, truly committing to a long-term project, examining ephemeral works acquired by a collection and the preservation of their traces, and exploring the evolution of an artist’s body of work… Added to this was the atmosphere of the site: a former factory set to be renovated. All these points led us to interpret the museum as a place that would represent itself as a space-time and that would not deny its industrial past. Our proposal therefore consisted of placing time at the center of the mode of representation. The language thus conceived was based primarily on a time scale. It functioned as a signature integrated into the content of the expression, an identification tool for recognizing the institution’s media, and an instrument for indicating dates and durations. Beyond this signature, we designed communication materials that worked, for example, with materials that react differently to time. For the museum’s opening, the venue opened while part of it was still under construction, and the poster conveyed this dimension of time and work in progress through its iconography. Christian Bernard subsequently asked us to update this visual identity on the same basis. We therefore worked from 2007 to 2009 on introducing a more contemporary typeface and, above all, on developing iconography that would contribute to the identity of the exhibition cycles. 

Design team — Ruedi Baur, Denis Coueignoux, and Olivier Duzelier