The specialist jury at the 57th International Calendar Show awarded FSB a prize for the company’s very first wall calendar.

The specialist jury at the 57th International Calendar Show awarded FSB a prize for the company’s very first wall calendar. Indeed, the eastern Westphalian makers of door and window handles received a gold medal. The largest and oldest event of its kind in Europe, the exhibition and the internationally recognised competition that goes with it were organised by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economics, Graphischer Klub Stuttgart e.V., Kodak GmbH of Stuttgart and the Print and Media Association in Baden-Württemberg. A total of 1,094 calendars were entered - 951 from Germany and 143 from ten further countries. The Graphischer Klub jury assessed the entries’ overall impact, marketing conception, functionality and manufacturing criteria. A total of 61 calendars received awards. Six entries won gold, 18 silver and 32 bronze.

The FSB calendar opens up a surprising vista on our company’s principal product - the door handle. Far from capturing our products front-on in the accustomed manner, photographer Rafael Neff has veritably divested 13 handle models of their inherent function and semiotically relocated them. The pictures taken of our products speak a language of their own. Put together with ambitious artistic intent, they portray door handles as they are seldom perceived on entering a room, namely as duos. Who on earth ever looks at the leaf of a door side-on? An uncommon and a very severe perspective - heightened by the idiosyncratic interplay of light and shade - lends these “extension-of-the-hand tools” a great variety of guises.

Can the objects that present themselves to the beholder here still be said to be door handles at all? Or are they, to put it philosophically, “pure means”? This is a concept coined by the philosopher Walter Benjamin in his work “Critique of Violence”, in which he establishes a link between the pure means of objects and the pure means of action. Both are rooted in a culture that defines the likes of heartfelt courtesy, inclination, love of peace, and trust as being its subjective basis. Facing this is their objective appearance: Benjamin understands pure means as being not direct but indirect solutions. Thus they place themselves between individuals and offer themselves, with reference to the door handle, as mediators in the form of door openers. In the photos adorning FSB’s calendar this field of tension becomes an open question. Have these door handles become detached from their intended use? Do they no longer communicate their purpose, merely existing for their own sake instead? Or are they objects that speak to the beholder, conjure up associations and aspire to be “taken in hand”? Measuring a very generous 70 cm by 45 cm, the pages of the FSB calendar are an open invitation to make up one’s own mind on the matter.

The prize-winners and a representative selection of calendars will be on show at the regional council hall (Regierungspräsidium) in Karlsruhe from 15 February to 18 March 2007. Further exhibitions are planned in Vienna, South Africa and Namibia.