PROJECTS

GRUP ABACUS

Creative concept
Art direction
Photographic intervention on the work of Toni Amengual
Manifesto
Generic poster and artist adaptations
Performance communication system
Website
Social media assets
Media plan

Festival Clàssics. Grup Abacus.
Provoking in order to open up conversation.

The audience for cultural festivals either renews itself, or fades. To grow, ELS CLÀSSICS had to stop behaving like a classic.

Festival Clàssics, organised by La Casa dels Clàssics de Abacus, dedicates each edition to a central theme. This year: desire. An uncomfortable, fertile, incandescent territory.

The campaign’s mission was twofold: to create enough impact to stand out in a saturated cultural calendar, while also broadening the audience. We needed to provoke conversation without becoming gratuitous. To make a festival of thought and contemporary arts feel urgent, desirable and alive.

THE STRATEGIC APPROACH

The visual raw material was already powerful in itself: documentary photographer Toni Amengual’s work on mutilated phalluses from classical statuary. Canonical bodies marked by censorship, time and modesty.

The question was not how to soften them, but how to activate them.

We decided to intervene in the images as if they had been vandalised, disrupting the marble with an immediate, gestural, unruly mark. The colour was no coincidence: a fuchsia that evokes Dionysus and the Roman bacchanals.

The colour of excess, ritual and desire breaking the established order.

If the classical body was silence, the graffiti was the voice returning.

THE SOLUTION

A visual system that brings two opposing codes into tension —sculptural solemnity and the urban stroke— in order to speak about the same thing: an impulse that neither time nor convention has managed to extinguish.

We created a manifesto that opened the door to the universe:

“Benvingudes al territori del desig. Un lloc antic i sempre nou.”

A statement that turns the programme into a place to enter, not a poster to look at.

The fuchsia intervention was applied as a modular system that breathes across every format: the generic poster, individual adaptations for each artist, assets for each performance, and a web architecture that maintains the rhythm of the street.

The palette dialogues with classical codes —the white of marble, Greek purity— but interrupts them with black and fuchsia: the colours of what has been forbidden and has never been entirely silenced.