Völklingen vs Villingen-Schwenningen exhibition catalog

“VvsV” isn’t simply an abbreviation — it’s a formula. It stands for “Völklingen versus Villingen-Schwenningen”, among many other possibilities, and marked the first group exhibition of SAR_Projektbüro at the Städtische Galerie (“municipal art gallery”) of Villingen-Schwenningen, a pittoresque town in the German Black Forest.

As usual, SAR_Projektbüro started things differently: friends of them (who were not invited to participate in the gallery building) came over and established a camp in the nearby forest, where they practised all kinds of artistic performances (“doing pottery in the morning, while being nude”, for example) while the others were working in the gallery.

The exhibition catalog is a smallish, zig-zag bound book with lots of type and images in fir-tree-green (PMS 343), printed on grey paper stock. The zig-zag binding divides the book in two parts: one for general information and the “forest people”, one for the projects inside of Städtische Galerie.

All text but the pagination is set in warm and charming Biblon. The page numbers were granted a custom design — Schwarzwal (“black whale”, a mythical creature that may well live in one of Black Forest’s deep lakes) is a contemporary, numeral-only sansserif with floreal (even arboreous) influences. VvsV, the cover lettering, references early-twentieth-century expressionism and the German reform movement.