Context

The design and build approach prioritised reduction, clarity and structural consistency. Every interface decision was evaluated against the question of whether it supported the work or distracted from it. The resulting site uses a simple visual language, neutral typography and a limited colour palette, creating a quiet framework in which the artwork and accompanying texts are given space to breathe.

A key challenge was accommodating extensive bilingual contextual writing without resorting to overlays or pop-up interfaces, which the artist explicitly wished to avoid. This was resolved through a vertically scrolling page structure in which imagery sits on one side of the layout and text on the other. French and English translations are distinguished through subtle variations in dark grey tones, allowing both languages to coexist clearly without visual competition.

The site was built using a content management system to support a large and evolving catalogue of work. While the overall structure remains consistent, the system allows for significant variation in content types, including still images, video, text-heavy projects and projects with minimal contextual material.

“We never step in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and we are not the same human being.” Ava Rasti paraphrases Heraclitus to articulate the context of her album ‘The River’. It is an album concerned with how location holds and hides memories, and inadvertently how perspective and time creates unreliable narration. During an artist residency at Fabrica in Italy, Rasti’s would visit The Piave river, finding peace and clarity in the surroundings. The Piave’s history - witness to horrific loss of life during the Napoleonic and First World Wars – the juxtaposition of the present - Rasti and her friends at play - and the banks’ blood-soaked past, profoundly affected the musician. Suggesting the fluidity of memory, Ava extracted brief sequences from renowned classical compositions, replaying them endlessly until the fragments transformed into something entirely unrecognisable from their origins.

Design Overview

Each copy of the limited vinyl edition features a unique, “one of one” hand-printed cover photograph. Photographer Alexander Gabriel was commissioned to darkroom print unique variations of his cover image from the original negative. Silver salt prints were immersed in water for several weeks. As the prints began to dissolve, they were removed at different intervals and allowed to dry. Each print, shaped by the movement of water and the passage of time, became a unique piece. With photography so inextricably tied to ‘memory’, these variations echo the album’s central concept of impermanence and Heraclitus’s most memorable insight: “The only constant is change.” Adding to a sense of tactility, and furthermore alluding to the idea of memory being imperfect and unreliable, we decided to use a pen-plotter machine to scribe the typography on the limited edition version of the LP—the pen plotter machine being something, like memory recall, that reproduces the same thing over and over but changes slightly different each time. The limited edition features hand-cut and hand-assembled housing and the vinyl is lathe-cut by hand.

Ava Rasti — The River

130701 / FatCat Records

Campaign curation & art-direction.
Limited Edition artwork and handmade package design and production.
Standard Album artwork design.
Campaign visualiser editing.

Album cover photography and printing by Alexander Gabriel

Album cover photograph by Yusaku Aoki.

Campaign videography by Rinko Tsukamoto.