Poster Exhibition

The exhibition presents the culmination of poster design workshops conducted at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. During the workshops, students explored the method of working with mind mapping as a tool for design rooted in contextual empathy.

Each poster presented in the exhibition is the artist's personal interpretation of a theme inspired by the DROGA DŌ festival program: "road of memory."

The mind map enables a journey through one's personal landscape of meaning. Beginning with an initial phrase and recording subsequent associations freely and without censorship, the creator charts a tree of intuitive and subjective connections between concepts, thoughts, and memories. This ever-branching network, viewed as a whole, offers insight into the author's individual mythology, and its skillful synthesis allows for the extraction of an internally truthful, personal, and intuitive response to the given design challenge.

By subsequently anchoring the design process in meaning, the workshops provided participants with an opportunity to practice conscious message-crafting, focused on authenticity and personal relationship with the subject matter, as opposed to purely visual considerations. Such a design process leads to creative responses that transcend personal expression, forming a bridge between "personal truth" and "truth of the subject."

The symbol in the corner of each poster, which also serves as the festival's logo, derives from shinnyō, one of the component elements of Japanese kanji ideograms. The kanji operate on a modular system: characters representing basic concepts appear as building blocks of more complex characters. Shinnyō means "to go," "to walk"; combined with other characters, it transforms into concepts such as "to circulate," "choice," "transparent," "to chase," "vicinity", etc.—words connected to notions of process, change, movement. Shinnyō also appears in the character Dō, which means “path” and forms part of the festival's name.

Each work makes original use of the symbol, expanding it with its own symbolism and thus creating an individual narrative about the journey.

Karol Tomoki Yamazaki

The DROGA DŌ Poster Design Workshops took place thanks to the support and coordination of Nomi Geiger (Head of Design Studies, Visual Communication Department, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem) and under the patronage of the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv.