Urban Pictograms
a Public Art Installation
by
Kaethe Wenzel

Launch: Thursday, April 3,
4:00 pm
onwards (remarks at 4:30)

D.G. Ivey Library
20 Willcocks street
New College

Pictograms are a familiar part of everyday life, as stylized information, signposts, hints, prohibitions, warnings. Seemingly neutral, they direct and orchestrate behavior and have an influence on how we treat and perceive each other. But who and what is included, who is excluded, what is unwanted, who is silenced, what is made invisible?

The aesthetics of pictograms is still essentially based on the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic Signs. This UN convention determined internationally standardized road traffic signs in 1968. Pictograms are the typography of a fossil, androcentric and automotive age. But how does this reconcile with the requirements of highly diverse, post-fossil and integrative societies?

This participatory pictogram project needs to be understood against this background. Who and what are we actually? Of what identities and avatars are we made up? What symbioses are we willing to enter?

During a workshop with our 125 New One students, Berlin-based Kaethe Wenzel asked: “how do you see and perceive Toronto?” “Where do you see problems and needs?” worried about food prices, about mobility and climate change; they were concerned about the homeless, about road rage and lack of connection and community.

Students translated their ideas into several pictograms. We selected, edited, and printed 5 of them to be displayed on the windows of the D. G Ivey Library. The pictograms not only reflect the principles, topics, and activism of the 5 courses offered by New One, but also provide a snapshot of the needs, desires, and frustrations of this generation of students towards a world all caught in car culture and aggressive business transactions; a world that desperately needs more multispecies fluidity, dialogues, justice, and care; a world that, as some of our students very clearly articulated “needs more revolutions.”

the project was a joint initiative between the NewONE Program and European University Flensburg and was possible thanks to a New College NCIF fund

Kaethe Wenzel

Kaethe Wenzel is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin and a professor of Aesthetic Practice and Contexts at European University Flensburg. Her public installations are inspired by science fiction narratives and display hopeful scenarios of gender and racial equality, multispecies and anti-specist communication and unconventional re-use of consumer technologies and other wasteful everyday items. Wenzel’s pictograms roam cities worldwide, as a decentralized installation consisting of open source stickers that end up on the back of laptops, on lampposts and water bottles. They also exist as urban interventions on parking lots in Germany (Flensburg, Viersen), as public art on the facade of an elementary school in Berlin and on city walls in Germany and Austria – and now on the windows of the D.G. Ivey Library