Hand-making modernist forms: the visual environment in Visaginas from the 1970s to the 2010s
ENThis article invites the reader to explore details of typefaces used in local newspapers published in Visaginas from the town’s founding in the 1970s onwards. These newspapers, published in Lithuanian and Russian under such titles as Energy Worker, Peaceful Atom or Peaceful Energy Worker, reported on progress in building the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP), achievements in constructing the physical and social infrastructures of Visaginas and the advancements thus being made down the path to wards the realisation of the communist ideal. At first glance, the design of the newspapers’ titles seems to reinforce the notions conveyed by their content: that the newspapers in this multi-lingual nuclear town are at the forefront of the construction of Soviet nuclear modernity. However, carefully looking at the forms and rhythms of the letters in which the newspapers’ names are written reveals that improvised and hand-drawn creativity had a strong part to play in their production. The article proposes that the unexpected reappearance of traces of artisanal work in the graphic design of Soviet nuclear modernism is worthy of further reflection. [...] The article uses a designer’s perspective to dig behind these details of typeface to uncover the processes through which these titles were produced. What emerges as a result are shifting and contradictory paradigms of copying, transliterating and improvising, of hand-writing and mechanical reproduction that cast the work of the Soviet designer in a rather different light than that generally imagined for designers working in the frame of modernism. The claim that I make in this article is that the paradoxes that emerge are of relevance not just for what they reveal about the role and practices of the Soviet designer, but also for what they suggest more widely about how Soviet modernism was incarnated in Visaginas.In this sense, my analysis of apparently insignificant details of the written forms of the names of Visaginas newspapers aims to provide a modest, but grounded contribution to a wider process of reconsidering modernity that has gathered pace since the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe enabled comparative studies of the competing modernising projects on either side of the Iron Curtain. The need for this questioning is especially vivid in Visaginas, since in line with the on-going decommissioning of the INPP, the town is required to confront the closure of its socialist modernist past and to reinvent its identity for the future. The argument made in this article is that, through an analysis of the material available in the town’s local newspapers, the lens of graphic design can contribute to both aspects of this challenge. [p. 100-101].
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