shut up magazine
with Julia Gebhardt
experimental | graphic design

It‘s fresh, it‘s hard and flawless: Shut Up magazine. The magazine got laminated in trancparency foil in a butchery, which makes it hard like a board.

The Song of Solomon from the bible is printed on the outside: „… Your lips are like a scarlet thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil. …“ The black lines censor advertising claims, which cannot or hardly be read e.g: „You are my perfect match“. If you open the packaging the magazine becomes soft again. The black lines are printed on the magazine cover and its back. The whole text on the foil is mingled now: the song of Solomon and the advertising claims become one text, they can‘t be distinguished anymore.

The actual content of the magazine are beautiful, female, photoshopped women having their mouth lasciviously opened. They were taken from advertisings printed in German magazines. The women were advertising any kind of products from perfume, insurances to herbal tea. A German publishing house sent us a box of all magazine issues they published in the past 3 months. We selected and scanned all women with opened mouths - from slightly to widely opened - and arranged them on 160 pages. All the advertised products are covered and censored with white space. Some of their claims are printed on the outside foil. No text is inside the magazine only the female presenters are left without their message.