Rio Cello
The Rio Cello International Festival reached its 26th edition in the middle of the pandemic. For the first time in its history, its encounters with music, dance and art happened online. In a moment of uncertainty and insecurity, in August 2020, culture became more essential than ever. And in rescuing time, that measured time which had suddenly stopped, we gave it a symbol of resistance and memory. In 25 years of annual presence, thousands of people were moved, many stories were transformed, countless performances were presented. In its 26th year, all of that history was Re/viewed, Re/lived, Re/membered. With a selection of the most emblematic encounters in music, an online programme was shared, bringing back emotion and inspiration in hard times. Marking a whole lifetime in a pause. The graphic project recovers the festival’s visual history and brings the symbolic essence of music to the surface, in a systematic and memorable way.
Dal Segno is a musical term that means “from the sign”, telling the musician to repeat a passage starting at the Segno symbol. A Place of Memory is a material fragment of a unit of time that serves, periodically, as a concentrated reminder to remember. Repetition and Memory. On these two fields we built the concept of the project, made visible through the musical elements that stand, as signs, for the marks of repetition in a score. Among so many records of the events, we selected the images that reflect the colour palette of the project, with red and blue, not by chance, as the main colours. Carried into the graphic universe, the afterimage projected in blue when we stare at red turns these complementary colours into a visual memory.
With broad research into the symbolic fields of music, with a deep immersion in the records of the festival’s 25 past years, and with the aim of creating iconic forms that could work across digital media, we developed a striking and versatile visual identity. Through digital experiments, the combination of graphic elements multiplies into signs and into visual and verbal content, always reinforcing the concept. To lighten the mood, we created Instagram filters that promoted the programme and blended it into the musicians’ lives at home. And to take this memory to the people whose stories were marked by the event, a tote bag with postcards and posters was sent out. Marking a time of anguish with culture and art.
