Social Protest
Jo Amar Gives a Platform /
Graduation Project
The project “Jo Amar gives a platform” is branding for a social protest, inspired by the character of the virtuoso singer Jo Amar. Jo was a special and unusual figure in his time, who worked his way up in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the first performers here.
As an artist Jo struggled with the Ashkenazi musical establishment, with the state radio of those times, which agreed to play Eastern music only for one hour in a week, during the program “Sounds
of the East at your Request”. He also raised his voice in protest songs he wrote such as “I went to Labor Bureau”.
Many years have passed since then and today Jo is considered by many singers in the field as the pillar of Eastern singing. In this assemblage Jo symbolically gives a platform to artists who are being pushed to the margins and who represent the different voices in Israeli society in all of its shades, and brings to the front of the platform the ones who usually don’t reach our ears and experience cultural exclusion. One of the major things I felt during my research was the fact that Jo belongs to a generation and time of modesty, to a time when singers focused on music and art, on delivering a message, without showing off.
I combined tools of protest and tools of culture, since it’s a cultural event, which is also a protest.
I took scenes from life in the periphery of the country and certain situations and complexities of our society and passed them all through the lens of oil pastels (“panda”), that refers to the old land of Israel, to simplicity and naivety, a land of basic
and simple colors, that also reminds
me the Kibbutz.
While all of those scenes are under one roof,
I give them the chance to enter the visual Hebrew canon, despite the fact that Jo
gives them the musical-cultural platform
in the event.
Along the way I remembered the handwriting of my grandfather, who was also the older brother of Jo, which was meticulous and special, which reminds me the authenticity of those times. I chose to combine it with a new digital version I made for Venus font, a letra-set font from the 1980s, and with a new version of Narkis font by Yanek Yontef. All of these fonts are old, and they now are being given a kind of revival.
Today Jo Amar and the Mizrahim in general don’t need a platform, and they earned their respect over the years with great effort. But since then many other artists continue struggling in order to break the
glass ceiling.
As Jo Amar fought discrimination in his own way, in silence and modesty, my protest as well is a silent protest, through music - which is the best way in my opinion and which is what Jo believed in.
Despite my passion for music in general, and my familial connection to Jo Amar in particular, I felt how much this project enriched for me the reason why I chose to learn Visual Communication, and I hope along the way as a designer I use the visual tools that I gained in order to help create a more accepting society, less noisy and loud, that knows how to listen to the other side as well, and together to reach a golden path.
