Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Media reports on the Balkans usually tend to present the region in a very sensationalist way, picturing it as a center of political unrest, economic downturn, social instability and never-ending ethnic conflicts. This sort of discourse is partly justifiable given its turbulent history in the last five centuries, but tends to neglect the diversity of cultures that are historically found in the region. A two-day symposium Balkan Locus-Focus: Long 20th Century Visual Communication Design Histories, tried for the first time to map the history of visual communication design in the region, which has been noticeably absent from any global design historiography. Organized by Izmir University of Economics (IEU, Turkey) in collaboration with Parsons the New School for Design (United States), the symposium brought together a wide range of design historians, practitioners and theorists from the Balkans (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Turkey and Greece) and outside the region (United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, and Italy).