Archive of Conflict
Ares Maia
Archive of Conflict is a book dedicated to the melancholy of low-income suburban neighborhoods. The experience of growing up in disadvantaged circumstances in a wealthy neighborhood informs the book’s description of the suburbs as a desolate experience. With this quality in mind, the book asks how can design elucidate this emotion. In part, this is found in the book’s form: a square, seven inches by seven inches, gives the reader an experience of being inside a box. It is also found in the content it collects: images by artist Edward Hopper, photographer Gregory Crewdson, filmmaker David Lynch and many more, the book unfolds the harsh reality many people face in the suburbs of America. Its typography is minimal and dry.
These artists devote themselves to this dark Americana, to create haunting, grotesque, beautiful art that depicts a dramatic point of view of the mundane routines of ordinary American families. These works are filled with silent spaces, mysterious stillness, and abandoned scenes in order to offer a vision of the dark underbelly of suburbia. The book’s design, by introducing carefully constructed volumes of space in between these images, begins to offer a sense of distancing, loneliness, and disconnect of suburban life, an often misrepresented aspect of American urbanity.