Visual Communication

Guy Meldem × BA VC ZHdK: The Radical Poetics of Materiality

Guy Meldem orchestrates encounters between materials and necessity, between form and improvisation. His objects – raw, direct, unapologetic – exist in a state of productive tension: between utility and sculpture, between the preordained and the ad hoc. His practice resists refinement in favor of immediacy, champions rough edges over polished surfaces, and elevates the accidental to a principle of design.
For a week at ZHdK, Meldem's ethos of radical material honesty became a pedagogical method. In a workshop with BA Visual Communication students, the act of making light – both literal and conceptual – was stripped of its conventional constraints. What does a lamp become when freed from market expectations? When assembled not through the logic of industrial production but through the urgencies of experimentation?
The results: luminous objects that hover between function and fiction – makeshift architectures of illumination, gestures frozen in a state of constant becoming. Assemblages of bespoke posters, chicken mesh, electrical wire, and starch glue – provisional yet precise, crude yet poetic.
Meldem reconfigures the pedagogical space as a laboratory of friction. Here, errors become insights, instability is method, and resistance is generative. Rather than refining a predefined aesthetic, students engaged in speculative design, where failure proved as instructive as success.

The outcome of this week-long intervention does not conclude with the workshop. It extends into this fanzine – an afterimage of the process, a record of luminous experiments, a testament to the idea that design, when freed from functionalist dogma, becomes an act of thought.

The publication can be ordered for CHF 15.— directly via info.vvk@zhdk.ch.

Students: Viviane Bettschart, Stanislas Favre, Miles Fischli, Jelka Freivogel, Niclas Funk, Alicia Godel, Lois Grimm, Lia Grünig, Nina Hitz, Marina Huber, Marc Iselin, Clara Kuhnke, Alison Léger, Aatos Mononen, Vivien Pöhls, Valerie Rohner, Justin Scharer, Lea Spiess, Praveena Srirathan, Lisa Steiger, Dennis Vugts

Modul held by Guy Meldem