Market C:
street market

There is a market across the street from my home in Tallinn where I go for seasonal food produce – the market season explodes with fresh strawberries in June and wraps up with jams and sauerkraut before Christmas. The racks of clothes change their patterns with the season, there is fresh bread smell fighting with the fish smell from the kiosk next to it. This market looks so unkept and ‘dirty’ compared to the gentrified markets but has become so dear to me because it is one of the rare places in the city that is not yet designed by any one person or one team. It has organically and sporadically grown over time, with very DIY kiosks and little shelters to sell from. It is not (yet) sterilized and designed, not yet a market for ‘political consumption’ [1]. It is still too ugly and dirty for that, unfiltered, sellers only validated by the trust they have built with their customers, not a lot of inspection seems to be involved.

*

When looking at different patterns for long enough, I started to slowly unpeel the variety of pattern ‘languages’ among them. Working in graphic design, you always deal with image and text, ways of combining them. I wanted to use text in a way that is borderline ornamental, repetitive and mantra-like. To give text a more immersive role, where it is not next to images, but really swims together with other visual elements.

With the patterns I noticed I aim for a level of complexity that would be difficult for my brain to solve at a quick glance, hard to ‘see through’, although seductive for the senses at the same time. I found there is an ancient legacy similar to this called ‘interlace’, which comes from knots and other forms of decorative ropework and has been described as a way of protecting objects from ‘an evil gaze’. For example on the front and back of a book, to finalize and package a piece of work into a safe spell:

“Knots have a long-established place in the lore of supernatural attack and defence. A curse or a spell was often ‘secured’ with a knot, and could only be disarmed by physically untying it. … As a permanent ‘knot,’ it [the interlace] defied the evil-doer to untie it mentally by tracing out its windings and crossings, as one might solve a difficult maze.”[2]

1. ‘Do we have a moral obligation to the market?’ by Marija Nemčenko, Kajet magazine no 3. She describes a ‘Westernized’ and sterilised version of a street market, which is “presenting a hyper-ethical way of participating in capitalism that is masked as political action … one can consume in a sanitised and modern fashion, while fully embedding the practice … in the Western understanding of trade. One consumes not only the product, but a glossy shell of political connotations attached to it.”
2. The Language of Ornament, James Trilling, pp 134.