We received more than 1,000 projects from all corners of the world, and a thousand new interpretations of the Locarno leopard: the competition to find the visual guidelines for Locarno76 (August 2-12, 2023) drew a large, passionate crowd, offering one more reason to feel like part of the great Festival community.
The jury – consisting of the Festival directors and experts such as Emanuele Amighetti (Art Director of Esquire Magazine Italy), Charlotte Colbert (filmmaker and multimedia artist, winner of the Locarno74 Swatch First Feature Award for She Will), Walter Fasano (director and editor, frequent collaborator of Luca Guadagnino and Dario Argento), Carlo Giordanetti (Product and Design Committee and CEO of the Swatch Art Peace Hotel), Patrick Gyger (Director of Platform10), Michele Jannuzzi (Head of Jannuzzi Smith and brand consultant for the Festival) and Denise Tonella (director of the Swiss National Museum) – was unanimously won over by a work whose strength lies in being delicate, in the power of suggestion and in the refusal of ostentation, acting counter to the dominant tones of contemporary communication.
It's the work of a British duo, Sarah Diante and Ciaren Diante. Their concept pays tribute to the Festival’s penchant for constant dialogue with its time: hence the image where the traditional leopard appears to merge with a female figure and the extreme freedom of a new color – blue – that enriches the Festival’s yellow and black palette. Sensuous, enigmatic, refined: the Locarno76 poster harkens back to English painterly traditions, from the ethereal female figures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, with visual references to 20th century optical art. It’s an open image, filled with mystery, that invites us to get closer to what goes beyond acquired values, and to discover a world whose borders and perspectives are always on the move.
In addition to being part of the Festival billboards, Sarah and Ciaren Diante’s work will inspire the event’s promotional and informational content, both physical and digital. The Locarno76 audience will thus be drawn into a dream-like creative dimension, where they can rediscover cinema in all its image-related power.
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