As agency of the year 2017 at EBGE, The Greek Graphic Design & Illustration Awards, we did have the duty to design the visual identity of EBGE 2018.
In our proposal we make a reference to a typical Orthodox Sacred graphic ritual: the Cross Graffiti with Holy candle fire. The Greek orthodox tradition prescribes that after having received the Holy Light during the Great Easter Liturgies one protects his house and family by designing with the Holy Light a cross above the entrance of ones home.
By referring to this perhaps superstitious ritual we are honoring one of the oldest human symbols: the cross. Cross-shaped incisions make their appearance in faraway times as petroglyphs in European cult caves, dating back to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, and throughout prehistory to the Iron Age. However known as one of the most perverted and bloody symbols of history we would like to see in the cross a timeless philosophical meaning. Connecting the horizontal with a vertical is done in many different cultures through time make us think of a universal experience. Even if we believe that the design field does have many “religious” “ritualistic” or “cult” aspects we see the cross mostly as a highly functionalist construction that we keep on meeting in our own design practice. In that respect we think of the “Black Cross” painted in 1923 by Kasimir Malevich as an attempt to free the cross from its religious and political weight and to reach a pure state of perception: "The art of the past which stood, at least ostensibly, in the service of religion and the state, will take on new life in the pure (unapplied) art of Suprematism, which will build up a new world—the world of feeling….”
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