Vagamondes 2021

Vagamondes is a festival organized by La Filature, the national concert hall in Mulhouse, France. Its aim is to show different aspects of southern cultures, in terms of music, cinema, dance through a variety of shows, all supported by lectures and round tables questioning the legacy and evolution of the countries involved.

Atelier 25 is in charge of visual identity for Vagamondes. The challenge of this 9th edition was to design an identity for a festival that would take place solely online. In order to render the idea of different territories meeting in a single virtual place, the designers interlaced patterns evoking geographical shapes, and kept the color palette usually found in maps. What is interesting is the inversion of the usual color and shapes association: what looks like an isthmus being represented in blue and the sea in a light brown color. At the same time, the collision of all these different spaces happens againts a background of water, relating to the fact that most of the artists participating in the festival are from countries surrounding the Mediterranean sea. Overall, this identity for Vagamondes represents the strangeness of the times we are living in, where the access to other countries and cultures can not be experienced abroad, but only from the private space of our homes, in a kind of inversion of the relationship we have with the world.

In addition to the subtlety of the composition, Stratos from Production Type emerges from the different shapes we can see. The text set in caps works nearly as signage, labelling the territories while at the same time loudly announcing a festival “without borders”. This urge of rethinking our notions of space and territory is perfectly carried by Stratos and its impactful design.