about

When one of my eldest sisters fled Kosovo to find refuge in Germany during the first Balkan war in the 1990s, she had to hide her passport and documents to avoid being deported immediately. She told me that she had sewn them into her underwear to slip them through.

I think of the stitch as a border, a separator, while at the same time, it acts as a connector—it is ambiguous. It is a porous membrane that holds the parts it separates in its firm grip. Within the human body, the diaphragm is a boundary (“fence”, in Greek). In Ancient Greece, it was believed that this was where the soul was located. It was impenetrable: it separated the pure and clean organs—heart, lungs, and further up: the brain—from the unholy, dirty parts such as the intestines and faeces. It was believed that only laughter—through the vibration it causes—made the diaphragm permeable and allowed the two parts of the human body to unite.

The font Times is the go-to font of legal business, of bureaucracy, and academia. It is the industry standard for legal documents created for court. It is so familiar, we no longer perceive it as a designed form, but as a carrier of power and certitude.

This is where Rhymes comes in, wilfully confusing, it may almost pass for the Times—identity theft! Rhymes is a font drawn between 2017 and 2021, based on early discarded forms of the Times—that is, the designs that have never been digitized before. It deceives us into a visual sense of security, but in the end, it is a quirky changeling.

Enver Hadzijaj, Graphic Designer
of the 13th Berlin Biennale