Through the 10 openings for the Degré 48 project, the collective of graphic designers g.u.i. gives shape to the thirty-some manifestos that will be called upon in a year. It tells the story. A kind of documenting.
There is a first layer. It’s an amalgam. It is the remains of historic manifestos, the forms they took for distribution, texts and images, printed or digital. For example there is the Futurist Manifesto, 1909; Dada Manifesto, 1918; De Stijl Manifesto, 1918; Surrealist Manifesto, 1924; Concrete Art Manifesto, 1930; Manifesto Against nothing for the International Exposition on Nothing, 1960; Nouveau Réalisme declaration, 1960; Fluxus Manifesto, 1961; First Things First Manifesto, 1964; Hacker’s Manifesto, 1986; Riot Grrrl Manifesto, 1991; Repair Manifesto, 2004; Neen Manifesto, 2006; Free Font Manifesto, 2006; Manifesto of the Dance Museum, 2009; Incomplete Manifesto for Change, 2011… All reprinted, redistributed, copied, repeated on the internet. We pick up the trail, we accumulate their visual structures, the lines along which they are drawn, the traces and bricks that make them up. It’s a first impression, always the same. Then there is a second layer, a second impression. It’s a text. It’s manifest. It plays with letters gathered up, their rash confrontations. We assemble them in a typography, that’s the 48 Soft. Then it’s a brutal piling up until a hard body, a shared body, a direct and limping skeleton comes out of it. That’s the 48 Hard.
Then there is a third layer. It marks the manifestation, it takes note of public time, of what is going on, of what is said, while they are being called upon. This third step is plural. This layer is constantly changing, every passage is different. For this last one a device is tested and invented, by several people, by many. We also receive information from spectators. A device for the reaction to what happens as it happens. The rest remains to be built.

Manifesto #1: A Constructed World Medicine Show

Manifesto #2: Kristina Solomoukha & Paolo Codeluppi, Fabien Vallos, Ludovic Sauvage

Manifesto #3: Bertrand Belin, Nicolas Tilly and Stéphane Bérard

Manifesto #4: Antoine Dufeu and Patrick Corillon

Manifesto #5: Laure Limongi, Fabrice Reymond, Valentina Traïanova

Manifesto #6: Mehdi Brit and Morgane Rousseau

g.u.i. is a collective of designers for published works, image and interaction created in 2006 that today includes Bachir Soussi Chiadmi, Nicolas Couturier, Julien Gargot, Angeline Ostinelli and Benoît Verjat. Based in Paris, Strasbourg and Rotterdam, the collective collaborates with public and cultural institutes, working groups and artists, mainly in the fields of contemporary art and performance. Their work examines organisation, how collections of documents take shape and are accessed, designing tools for publishing and collective documentation, as well as setting-up user-based systems. To do that, they teach, design structures for projects and devices, draft identities and typographies, develop digital interfaces, create images, books and spatial installations. Out of a desire to share and experiment, the collective works with fine arts, decorative arts and applied arts schools in Rennes, Nancy, Cergy, Nantes, Paris and Strasbourg.