Penso en Yu
WHAT, HOW & WHY.
This project is a collection of three posters regarding the same theme; a French play translated to Catalan called Penso en Yu. It narrates the tragic imprisonments of three rebels amidst the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. GREC Festival and Sala Beckett, organisers of the event, sent out a contest for the poster that would be featured in press and theatres.
All three posters were done digitally using Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop. After the first selection, two of the four final general proposals were mine, even though I ended up in 2º and 3º place ultimately. Afterwards, one of the posters was featured in several other exhibits and pieces of editorial.
I chose to work on this because I found the play to be extremely compelling; it's only a three-person act. It was very intense and the script resonated with me as I'm really interested in how one story can jump between mediums and languages, and still be as fascinating as it was, or even more so. It fortified the idea that regardless of region, there is always a place for amazing stories to flourish.
READ TO DRAW
I was hesitant with every proposal I came up with because I was relying on what little knowledge I had about China's protests in the 1980s and 1990s, but after researching a lot of content and finding out obscure references to the three aforementioned rebels, concepts came flowing.
It was much darker than the play suggested, and the famed Mao Tse Tung 'egg throwing' was pivotal in these students' lives. I decided on three proposals to present.
3 TO 2, 2 TO 1
The selection of two of my proposals for the final four came as a relative surprise, as I thought they were going to select the one they didn't. Nevertheless, I was happy with the selection and glad that a big audience was able to see my pieces.
After a while, one of my pieces, aptly named 'Continental Mao' was being used in other places, like the school's permanent exhibit, several temporal ones and a customised editorial made for IED Barcelona.
REVISITING
There is certainly real potential in the pieces, specially with 'Continental Mao' as I could play around with different proposals as the territories change. Aside from the pleasure of working with such an interesting topic, I learned that projects don't have to disappear the day they are presented, and that how much exposure they get is pretty much up to the author.
CLIENT: GREC FESTIVAL.
SPECIAL THANKS: ÓSCAR GERMADE, PABLO RAUSELL.
