mare/Summer School Südtriol
The visual identity of the festival
The Summer School Südtirol provides public discussion relating to urgent contemporary questions. To this end, an annual series of events is organised in which authors, artists and experts are invited to speak. Lungomare has supported this project as a companion and partner from its outset, together with providing the design for the communication materials. The constant of the design strategy developed for this purpose is nothing more than the logo, a lettering without embellishments. The various image concepts address every year’s topic and translate it into a visual language.
2025: Radikal Alt – L’età radicale
The topic of the 2025 edition of Summer School Südtirol focuses on old age and the experience of growing older, highlighting the knowledge and wisdom that develop over time. The program explores how a “mature” perspective, shaped by a lifetime of experience, can offer valuable contributions to contemporary culture and society, giving voice to a viewpoint that is often overlooked but full of meaning.
The visual identity created for this edition takes shape from an analysis of the term radical age, which encompasses both the apparent fragility and the deep strength that time is able to generate. To express this idea, the cyanotype technique was chosen: a photographic process based on exposure to light and time. The central image is a work by artist Davide Fecarotti: a cyanotype created on a field, a natural symbol of changing seasons and transformation. The colours used highlight the contrast between memory and vitality: silver, which suggests wisdom and reflection, contrasts with red, a symbol of life and energy. Typography, finally, is an integral part of the identity: a variable font that defines itself or dissolves, as if exposed to light and time, just like in cyanotype.
2024: Geschlechter werden und wiederlos werden – Quale genere? Generi in cammino
The 2024 edition of Summer School Südtirol focuses on the redefinition of gender roles, exploring the many meanings this concept can assume: for some, a hard-won liberation, for others, the end of traditional society. As always at Summer School Südtirol, this complex issue is examined through its political, social, and personal dimensions, offering tools to understand the ongoing transformation while asking: what does it mean to claim a gender – and what does it mean to be free from it?
Inspired by the colours of the rainbow flag, the visual identity for the 2024 edition of Summer School Südtirol is represented by a series of non-uniform color fields that touch, intersect, and blend. This fragmentation becomes a mosaic of ever-changing elements, capable of combining in infinite configurations, just like the complex and shifting nature of gender itself. The poster also serves as the program, where typography, background, and images come together in a colorful, multifaceted composition.
2023: Donne, come lottano, pensano, parlano, agiscono, amano – Wie Frauen kämpfen, denken, reden, handeln, lieben
Summer School Südtirol 2023 sees women coming from Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, Poland, South Tyrol, and Ukraine as main protagonists. These women are fighting for equality, defending democratic rights, and resisting autocracies. Their courage pushes them to the forefront of major protest movements and popular uprisings, often unnoticed and unacknowledged.
The graphic design aims to emphasise the determination of these women in pursuing their ideals, discovering alternative paths, and opening new ways of resistance. Typography is depicted as a map of languages and alphabets, with a yellow line running from top to bottom of the poster, tracing unseen directions and symbolising a common force transcending nationality. The front of the poster features words in outlines of different languages forming the background, with titles breaking away from the typography through color contrast. Large-format typography and repetition of text in different languages create a poster-manifesto accessible to all communities, with a powerful call to action. The back of the poster contains the program, with contents alternating through a hierarchy of colours.
2022: Trauma & Drama – When Wounds Remain
The visual identity of Summer School Südtirol 2022 was designed from a reflection on the duplicity of the meaning of the two words Trauma and Drama, the keywords of this year’s theme. Drama and Trauma are two seemingly opposite and distant words but linked by deep connections that manifest themselves in our lives through the most diverse effects.
This double tension is represented in the typographical layer, by the choice of a vertical layout, which confronts the two words letter by letter. A backslanted font was chosen to represent the concept of Trauma as a metaphor for a severe alteration of an individual’s normal state. A state that takes another direction, disturbs and disorientates. In parallel, like a solid and present shadow, the word Drama appears on the dark background of our unconscious. The only meeting point is the ‘&’ that like a knot ties these two concepts together. In conjunction with this typographic dialogue, there are seven colours that mix and interact with each other as a representation of the changes and inner tensions of our psyche. These shades chase each other across half of the double pages of the booklet, the edges of the flyers and from corner to corner of the poster. Sometimes creating brighter, sometimes darker spaces, but always connected to each other in a tension of contrasts between different lights. Graphically, the colours were also used individually to divide and create a hierarchy the different information in the different formats.
Year
2025 – ongoing
