Com-munis

Your words, our deeds. Com-munis stems from the need to understand one another: its title evokes munus, the gift that carries a commitment, and communis, what becomes common through sharing. Words, signs and gestures come alive when someone receives them, interprets them and puts them back into circulation. To communicate is to participate, to set something in motion.

The series interprets the two-handed manual alphabet, a system in which finger positions represent letters shown in sequence to spell words. I recreated the poses from the historical chart with my own hands, then reworked them and coloured them yellow. I overlaid these gestures with shapes that try to visually imitate letters, without following a codified lettering technique: their tension between recognition and ambiguity gives form to the difficulty of communicating and the effort needed to understand one another.

Twenty-two posters turn this meeting of body and sign into a shared visual language. The project was selected for Neologia 2022, the seventh edition of Graphic Days®’ design initiative.