Manuel Raeder — BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE

Talk
Chapter 4: Power
September 9th 2023

As our bodies move through a space, the space changes and so do we. Upon opening a book, our hands and eyes trace the pages – the book itself is changed in the act of reading, and so are we. In joining us at the Tangle in Helsinki, designer Manuel Raeder invites us to follow the trajectory of his life, of what has changed him and how he is changing perspectives within publishing and exhibition design.

Reminiscing on the soundtracks of his family home, in his talk Raeder traces his interest with typography and letter shapes back to a childhood love of street culture and graffiti. An interest with the material surroundings of place that he still pulls on to generate highly specific and culturally relevant work today.

Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite – the publishing house founded by Raeder – considers books an integral part of everyday life; reading can take place at any time of day. Things can be read and re-read at different trajectories, in different settings and at different moods. Reading is never the same experience twice. For Raeder, the publishing house was born out of a lack of reception from publishers to publish books as ‘other’ – perhaps as object or exhibition. As a result; Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite transforms the publishing process into one of close collaborations with artists, designers and craftspeople to conceptualise the book as a vital organ within the body of work it is part of. During his talk, Raeder describes one collaboration in particular; with artist Noa Schultz, where together they took up residence in a studio with a printing press, with Manuel photographing, scanning and typesetting the works produced. By working in this way; books begin to function as tools for documenting ephemeral moments, acting as a record of a specific time, place and interaction. 

“Design can have a lot of power when you actually step out and allow the body to fill the space, or allow the work to have context” – Manuel Raeder, Helsinki Tangle