36 Days of Type, 2022
Cities are written long before they are read. As Michel de Certeau suggests, the ordinary practitioners of the city move “below the thresholds at which visibility begins”—walkers whose bodies trace paths across an urban text they author without ever fully deciphering. Their movements resist the dominance of the gaze and the map; the city is produced not through plans, but through footsteps.
This project began from that position: down on the ground, walking.
Like artefacts, footpaths and pavements hold a record of our lives. For 36 Days of Type—an annual, global invitation to reimagine the alphabet—we turned to the marks, fragments, and accidental glyphs embedded in the surfaces we cross each day. Instead of designing letterforms, we documented them, gathering traces of a city speaking in its own vernacular. These characters exist in varying states of permanence and decay—half legible, wholly ordinary, and quietly resistant.
As the world drifts further into the virtual, Transitory Artefacts reclaims the physical: the dirt, dust, and imperfection that make cities human. It is a reminder that the city is not a static object but a continuous act of writing—one carried by those who move “down below,” shaping a text they leave behind, even if they never stop to read it.
“The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk — an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.”
― Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
36 Days of Type 2022
—Transitory Artefacts
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