Consumables

The Black Box Project: Portraits of Metropolises

Monday 10. December 2012 - A hundred years ago the world had only one city with more than a million inhabitants - London. Today there are more than a hundred such cities and 25 metropolises with over 10 million inhabitants. The migration and urbanisation behind this growth formed the starting point for photographer and filmmaker Jens Assur's contribution to the Black Box Project.

For almost two years Iggesund Paperboard has been operating the Black Box Project, with exhibitions in cities like Paris, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Milan and New York. Iggesund has challenged a number of well-known international designers and design companies to fill a black box of a specified format with contents that in some way test the limits of Iggesund’s Invercote paperboard.
“Do the inhabitants of Tokyo have more in common with those of London, New York and Stockholm than with people living in rural Japan? Do metropolises create cultures that stretch far beyond national borders and language barriers?” are questions posed by Jens Assur in the 30 photographic portraits of cities that are his contribution to the project and that were unveiled at the Flacon Design Factory in Moscow at the beginning of December.
The portraits, which are printed on Invercote from Iggesund Paperboard, were divided up into smaller tiles and then randomly distributed among the black boxes. Box owners can create their own individual metropolis with the tiles. Anyone wishing to exchange tiles can do so via a dedicated website: blackbox.iggesund.com/trade
Jens Assur began his career as a photographer for the daily press. In the 1990s he was Sweden’s most award-winning photojournalist. He gradually left the press world and began focusing on filmmaking. His films such as The Last Dog in Rwanda and Killing the Chickens to Scare the Monkeys have won multiple international awards. Partly due to this success, at the beginning of 2012 he was the first Scandinavian to win the Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award, the Sundance Festival’s prize for promising filmmakers.
“When I was asked to take part in the Black Box Project I didn’t hesitate a second,” he says enthusiastically. “As a creative artist, it’s rare that I have the opportunity to work so freely and at such a high artistic level in a customer-initiated project. But in this case we could do so on both a conceptual and intellectual level.”
Carlo Einarsson, Director Market Communications at Iggesund Paperboard, is very pleased with Assur’s participation in the project.
“We’re looking for creative individuals who really push the limits of what can be done with Invercote,” he explains. “But the project is also a tribute to all the designers who have chosen over the years to make fantastic creations using Invercote as their starting point. We’re especially gratified by the great interest our exhibitions have received from designers and the graphic industry in many parts of the world.”
Einarsson says the Black Box Project is not a traditional advertising campaign in which the client expresses detailed wishes and closely supervises the project’s execution. The participating designers have great freedom. The only restrictions are that they must work with Invercote and create something that reflects their own distinctiveness and Invercote’s possibilities.
“The degree of freedom combined with the opportunity to create something extraordinary has made it easy to find interested participants,” he says. “A number of designers have contacted us and asked to be part of the project. We’re very satisfied with the response so far, both to our exhibitions and to our web pages about the project.
“In a world where the choice of materials is unfortunately often a matter of habit, it’s important for us to showcase the extra possibilities which Invercote offers designers to fully realise their creative ambitions.”
In May this year the Black Box Project presented the work of a sixth designer in Milan. Japanese-American paper sculptor Jeff Nishinaka contributed his interpretation of Pandora’s Box in a red(!) black box.
The other exhibitors are the Dutch firm of van Heertum Design, technical magicians who delight in combining printing techniques, use more than 30 inks and varnishes, and then add extra finishing touches, to the joy of printing fans and the despair of production economists. Landor, Paris elegantly demonstrates how designers explode all boundaries established by their clients. Brunazzi & Associati from Turin created a survival kit for pasta lovers with both pasta tongs and a colander, all made of paperboard. New York-based Frenchman Marc Benhamou presents his concept of beauty in a new interpretation of the Tarot’s 22 Major Arcana cards. And Germany’s Sebastian Onufszak contributed a film about the closed circle of life, which is played on a video player integrated into Invercote paperboard.
“This project is an adventure and we don’t really know where it will all end,” Carlo Einarsson concludes. “But Invercote is one of the strongest brands on the European paperboard market, and with that as a secure foundation we can dare to try new channels of communication.”