A book records a massacre in Taiwan written from an outsider perspective.

 

Client

Nicolas Datiche & Agnès Redon　
The Ministry of Culture of Taiwan
Memory foundation of 228

Publisher

Éditions René Viénet

Printing

Ji-Cheng Print Workshop

 

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the events of February 1947, a massacre in Taiwan, two French journalists-Nicolas Datiche and Agnès Redon planned to collect the testmonies of the victims and their families. They made concrete a unique prokcet of documentation in both the French and English languages.

The name of the book is <<Les témoignagesdu silence-Le massacre du 28 février à Taïwan>> in french and <<Testmonies of Silence-The massacre of 28th Feburary in Taiwan>> in English and it was published in January 2018.

The project is presented in a hardcover book and this documentary research combines the use of extensive photographic work, including a series of 15 portraits, with interviews and testimonies from surviving victims and the family members of victims. These reports give a voice to those directly related to this period. They also show the make up and the complex and rich identity of the territory of Taiwan and allow us to see that the country is still subject to profound ethnic and political divisions. These raw human testimonies, that have been silenced for too long, also show how the search for symbolic places is an integral part of remembering, and will be followed in this ambitious work.


THE DESIGN APPROACH:

To eco the heavy topic of the oppressed voices, the book is presented with hardcover that is covered by regina fabric and foil stamped in gloss black. As the project is not only about revealing the testmonies of the victims and their families but also demonstrating the perspective of people nowadays and how they are going to process transformative justice, the main colour tone of the book is dark green, metaphorising hope and peace will never hidden by the darkness.

In general, the layout of the pages are aligned to the priciple of being simple and categorising each sections to fit the main concept of each chapter. Since portraits are the soul of the book to be the first book narrating the 228 incidients in a photojouralism style which leveraging a combination of texts and graphics to tell stories, the layout is aligned to photobook to give a maximum impact from the graphics.