Designing the Night
Designing the Night
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Back by popular demand, here is the second print run of Katarina Serulus' previously sold-out masterpiece 'Designing The Night'.
This book is dedicated to the Belgian nightlife’s rich graphic culture. Based on private archives et interviews with club culture personalities, the author analyzes the most popular graphic patterns since the first clubs in the 1970’s to the rise of electronic music festivals in the 2000’s.
In the late 1980s and 1990s Belgium’s club culture was at its peak: vacant buildings in historic city centres became art and music hotspots, while homes close to major highways in the countryside have been transformed into spaces that live only at night. Inside, mirrors, music and bouncing bodies created an artificial world, and colorful laser beams illuminated atmospheric clouds that emanated from fog machines. Thrilled by this fascinating, shared universe, youth from all over Europe came to Belgian clubs in order to dance throughout the night and staying well after the sun came up the next day. Often, flyers and posters are the only physical reminders left from the parties that took place the night before. Usually reduced to their function of being fast consumable and to gather as many people as possible into nightclubs, a closer look on these graphic ephemera reveals the wide range of lifestyles, graphic strategies, subcultures, music genres, identities and creativity fostered by Belgian club life. The exhibition features a collection of never-before-shown graphics including those of iconic clubs like Mirano, Fuse, Plan K, Boccaccio, La Rocca, Carre, and many more.
This book is co-published by ADAM (Brussels Design Museum) for their 'Designing The Night' exhibition (March 1st to May 5th 2019).
112 pages
27 x 20 x 0.9 cm
Language: English, French, Dutch
Softcover
Publisher: CFC éditions
Designed by: Ward Heirwegh
Katarina Serulus studied art history and design cultures at the KU Leuven and the VU Amsterdam. In 2016 she defended at the University of Antwerp her PhD thesis entitled Design & Politics: The Public Promotion of Industrial Design in Postwar Belgium (1950−1986) that was published in 2018 by the Leuven University Press.
She was an Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2020−2021) and project manager at the Flanders Architecture Institute in Antwerp (2017−2023) where she was responsible for the policy on design archives and initiated the project Wiki Women Design (2020).
Serulus also (co)curated several design exhibitions. She was the curator of the exhibition Panorama: A History of Modern Design in Belgium (Design Museum Brussels, 2017) and ‘Designing the Night. Graphic Design and Belgian Club Culture 1970 – 2000’ (Design Museum Brussels, 2019). She co-curated the first comprehensive overview of the design history of the nightclub ‘Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 to today’ together with Cat Rossi and Jochen Eisenbrand that opened at the Vitra Design Museum in 2018 and toured until 2022.
