EDUCATION AND IDENTITY

One of the great promoters of communication, typography invites us
to meditate on, not only the form of letters but also, albeit with a
500 year delay, on the vicissitudes of the cultural memory of the
peoples of America. The opening provided by the rapidly extending
design of digital fonts is forcing us to pay attention to the sounds
that characterize our individual languages.
Identity is a
cultural reality that, in essence, implies among many other factors the
valuation and consideration of the individual history, culture and
geography of each group of people. Communication could not conceivably
be analysed without the inclusion of these variables. In the specific
case of Latin America, the same mother tongue is articulated in dozens
of different sonorous and expressive nuances, that talk to us and that
enable us to identify their origins. It would not be right to take
Spanish, or more broadly, European culture, as the only parameter of
fusion. Among other things, colonization imposed a belief in a destiny
tied by language and customs to the culture of Spain, the mother
country. However long before the arrival of the Spaniards to the
American continent, the ethnic and idiomatic diversities in these lands
were already fusing and influencing each other. The languages borrowed
from each other, the great pre-Colombian empires underwent their own
metamorphoses and, in a unique form of cultural learning, absorbed the
neighbouring languages best adapted to the ever growing need to
transmit ideas throughout such vast territories.
In this
process of natural selection, abruptly interrupted by the Spanish
conquest, some sounds were lost forever while others prevailed over
time, enriching our speech with words, accents and idiomatic
expressions. Today this phenomenon could cross the barrier of sound and
enter the realm of everyday reading and writing, as another way of
legitimising its particular existence.
This explosion of
design and research of Latin American typography contains an inherent
as yet unexpressed power, which must perforce be understood. The fact
is that letters, besides reconstructing the cultural codes that make
them timeless, also follow roads that are intrinsically specific. The
study of this complex subject, which though it has the same basic codes
is materialized in different forms, and the discovery of the applicable
methods, are the most demanding challenges of the times.
It
would seem that the road to follow must necessarily look beyond
historical reiteration. Latin America has the potential to study the
incorporation of different fields of knowledge; the formal fields of
course, but also those that lead to them, and it is here that education
and culture once again share the same road.
About this article
This article was originally published in tipoGrafica 60: year XVIII, April-May, 2004, p. 02
It was translated into English by Peggy Jones and Martin Schmoller.
About Ruben Fontana
Ruben Fontana is a designer and typographer. He has chaired the subject
of Typography at the University of Buenos Aires. He has also lectured
and taught Master's degree programmes at a number of universities in
both America and Europe. He is the representative of the Association
Typographique Internationale (ATyPI) in Argentina, and has designed the
Fontana ND font, among others.
tipoGrafica is a Design and Typography Magazine made in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for designers and visual communicators around the world. Since 1987, tipoGrafica magazine has provided a forum for debate, communication and exchange of ideas and knowledge. Its staff of advisors and contributors comprises top international specialists.