Open Letter: “Anthropo-sign” by Matas Buckus

Page Not Found proudly presents the fifth chapter of Open Letters. The project invites The Hague artists to occupy our large storefront window with messages of urgency and vulnerability. 

Artist and designer Matas Buckus shares two selected graphic interpretations of Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World”. Produced manually with leftover pieces of adhesive vinyl and Dymo labels, the two selected compositions were scanned and vectorized, without excessive refinement, to be displayed at a larger scale. 

The eco-systems of earth are slowly but surely collapsing. As citizens, we have minimal control over the factors which affect the environment the most. Facing that fact, are there mind-sets we could inhabit in order to help balance our relentless human impact on planet earth? 

The use of contemporary technology in graphic design has exponentially grown in the past years, but has this been solely beneficial? Can we admit that anything viewed on our screens is technically not ‘real’, a composition of microscopic pixels, replicating and imitating images and principles of the real world? This seemingly non-existent distance between the human and the machine can be distracting, especially in the design process, simulating perfection that can easily be obsessed over.

This Open Letter was unveiled on 10 December 2021 and will be exhibited until 10 January 2022.

Open Letters are freely accessible from the street at any time.