Title: The New Republic of Letters
Category: Webdesign, Identity
Year: 2020
Design: Richard Wilde, Nikola Wilde
Code: Hynek Kvapil
Client: IIR Prague, IWM Vienna
Typefaces: Dino, IIR Affair

Respublica litteraria, or Republic of Letters, a term first recorded in the oeuvre of Erasmus Rotterdamus, historically stood for an intellectual community in the early modern Europe engaged in a regular pattern of correspondence at distance. By means of their communication characterised by reciprocity and openness, citizens of the republic formed a complex network through which ideas were exchanged, explored, and critically examined. It was a veritable civil society scattered across the continent that turned the advances of postal services to push forward horizons of knowledge and lay down intellectual foundations for many transformative social processes of the time.

This project, carried forward jointly by the Institute of International Relations Prague and Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), proposes to reenact this concept for the purposes of exchange of visions of the future of Europe and her place in the ever changing world.

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