St. Joost School of Art & Design, Breda, 2014. The room I had built around the work.
Before St. Joost I had studied media design. They had taught me how to design. At St. Joost, the art academy in Breda where I studied Graphic Design from 2011 to 2015, they taught me something else. They taught me to ask why.
It was a difficult lesson, because the why they meant was rigorous. At St. Joost a project lived or died on its concept. Every brief had to rest on a concept that could survive being questioned from every side. Why this work, why this form, why this audience, why now. The commercial questions sat inside that larger one. Who is the client, who will pay, who will buy. If you wanted to live from this trade, you needed an answer at the concept level too, because that was the level the academy itself was trained on. Almost everything I wanted to do, I had to defend there first. I would walk into a critique with a Mandaic typeface or a piece of Mandaic iconography under my arm, and the room would gently want to know what the concept was, and behind it, who would ever buy. Mandaic typefaces have very small markets. Mandaic iconography has almost no market at all.
I kept pulling at the edges. If the briefing was for a music venue in Rotterdam, I would research the Art Déco building behind the brief until it had no more secrets. If the assignment was open enough to take a side step, I would bring something Mandaic into it. I was the student who turned commercial questions into historical ones, and historical questions into design ones. In 2013 I chose the Mandaic script as my minor. I thought I was choosing a subject for a semester. It was the beginning of the work of my life.
What I could not yet articulate, in that room at twenty-five, was the answer that took years to find words for. The script I was working on was not a market. It was a people. The Mandaeans are roughly sixty thousand now, scattered across the world, with a script close to two thousand years old that is sliding toward functional silence. I come from a priestly line that has carried that script forward for twenty-four generations, father to son, ending with me. My grandfather rebuilt the priesthood when the office had nearly broken. The script is the version of that work that has fallen to me. I was not doing a thesis project. I was beginning what I now understand to be a long apprenticeship.
My teachers could see the diligence in the work. They could see the technical fluency. What they could not always see was the world the work belonged to, because that world sat outside the field of vision the academy had been built to teach. The audience I was preparing for was small, scattered, and almost invisible to a school whose strength was developing concepts for the world the academy could see. The result was that my teachers sometimes felt locked out of the process. They said so, kindly, in their feedback. They could see what I was making. They could not always see why.
One teacher above the others stood by me through that period. Ad van der Kouwe. He believed in me even when I could not yet answer the question he was supposed to ask me. He understood that the answer would come later, and that what I needed in the meantime was room.
In the end I did two large Mandaic projects at the academy. The first I will write about in another post, because it has become the work I am still doing, and there are rules I keep around how that one is spoken of in public. The second was about Mandaic iconography, the symbols and figures and ornaments that live inside the manuscripts. In the photograph that runs with this post, the wall behind me is hung with photocopies of the original Mandaean manuscripts, the source material I was working from. I know that body of work from inside, in the way only years of attention can make possible.
When I graduated in 2015, the assessment team wrote a small portrait of me, the kind the academy publishes for each finishing student. They called me their historian. They wrote: "Ardwan is our historian. He loves history and prefers to dive into it completely. Whether it is his own history, or the history of a building inside a brief, it doesn't matter to him. Collecting historical facts and images he does like no other. He searches, gathers, organises, and then he uses it." They closed by thanking me for my dedication and asking me to keep collecting.
I have kept collecting.
What kept me going then is what keeps me going now. The conviction that the work is right. A long patience I had inherited and now think is simply the family disposition. A day job to pay for the rest, so the historical research has never had to flatter a market. And the slow accumulation of evidence that the work bears fruit. Errors in the Mandaic Unicode block, repaired. A typeface built from the hand of a great scholar. The Mandaic words now sitting on millions of phones. A book in preparation that will, in time, answer a question the field has carried since Nöldeke. Ten years out from the academy, the posture has not changed. I still walk into rooms with a small script under my arm. I still meet the kind of why-question I was meeting at twenty-five. The difference is that now I have the beginning of an answer.
What stayed with me from St. Joost in the end was the question itself, not the commercial frame nested inside it. I dropped the commercial frame somewhere along the way, especially in the historical and typographic research where it is mostly out of place. But the why has not left me. With everything I do I still ask the same three things. Why did the people before me make this in this way. Why am I doing it now. Who is it for.
Those three questions are the inheritance from the academy. They are also, in a way, the structure of every chapter I now write.