In 2020 Santarcangelo Festival celebrated its 50th edition. During its fifty years, the Festival has collected not only a story to tell, but also a story composed of visual texts. Documents, posters, publications, photos, shows, and events that deserve to be remembered.
From the very start, our interest has been to better understand the relationship between the Festival itself, the city of Santarcangelo, and its citizens. The initial idea was to recover memories of those past Festivals, perhaps imprinted in the memories of those who had lived them.
Since the first residences in Santarcangelo we realised our idea was as romantic as it was impossible to realise. It was immediately clear that the relationship between the Festival and the citizens was uncertain, if not entirely null. We had to admit the failure of our project due to the fact that we never lived the Festival on our skin: we have never been part of it. So we became the protagonists of our own project. We started to document our journey and our research. Besides reporting our experience in a logbook, during our journey we investigated and asked the audience some questions related to freedom, art, and freedom in art. Somehow, we tried to identify the individual's relationship to some themes connected to the theater.
The uncertainty of the relationship between the Festival and the citizens, previously explored in Discreetly Personal, led us to investigate more deeply. We elaborated and proposed a questionnaire that deals with some themes that characterize art as well as theater and that so belong to. A questionnaire was thus designed and submitted to a sample of 120 people living in or around Santarcangelo.
The questions allowed us to identify the relationships and the reactions of the individual about the proposed themes — namely freedom, art, and freedom in art.
Our investigation tried to understand how one potential and real audience of the Festival relates to certain aspects of the art and its expressiveness.
Our investigation tried to understand how one potential and real audience of the Festival relates to certain aspects of the art and its expressiveness.
Questione di arte (Matter of art) is part of the Discreetly Personal project, that in the end featured an exhibition of 15 posters alongside the book. The series of posters showcased at the Baldini Municipal Library (Santarcangelo di Romagna) on 6 July 2019 represents both the conclusion of our journey and a data visualization of the collected answers - one poster for each question.
As a final gesture, we invited visitors to answer one last question with a sticker: Would you like to be an artist? Visitors could use an orange sticker for “yes” and a blue one for “no”, creating at the moment and without a predefined compositional rule a new data visualization.
The project itself is part of a bigger exhibition called 8Stories, which is a display of 8 group-class projects all focused on Santarcangelo Festival and its story.
ISIA Urbino
MA in Communication and Design for Publishing
Courses of Design Methodology and Graphic Production Techniques, supervised by Marco Tortoioli Ricci and Jonathan Pierini
July 2019
MA in Communication and Design for Publishing
Courses of Design Methodology and Graphic Production Techniques, supervised by Marco Tortoioli Ricci and Jonathan Pierini
July 2019
