The 30th anniversary of Malta Festival is a one-of-its-kind opportunity to review meanings and recycle symbols. Every Malta has been different containing multiple worlds. The visual identification of the anniversary edition, just as the festival itself, combines many different concepts: it plays with what is already there while revealing a new face. This year’s visual concept is brought to us, for the fifth time, by the Poznań-based Studio Bękarty. Marcin Matuszak and Krzysztof Ignasiak propose a reinterpretation of Malta’s posters, typography and image, showing its many faces and connotations. Meet Juno.
The visual concept contains many aesthetic riddles, motifs drawn from the archive of posters, which the keen eye of the festival audience is bound to spot. A piece of a mask from the poster of Malta’s first edition in 1991, created by Krzysztof Dziamski and Maciej Koszela. Or the iconic ‘Malta tune,’ written for the 1998 festival by composer and director Jerzy Satanowski, featured in this year’s festival spot produced by Studio Kineza.
Our search for the anniversary persona led us to the source, to antiquity where theatre was born. There, we discovered a Roman goddess: queen of the gods, of community and vitality; the guardian of beauty; our inspiration and your advisor. Juno. Our heroine. May she watch over us.
All three posters show lips and eyes: the senses of the festival and the audience. Observers and critics of the past thirty years. Focused and ambiguous. Capable of uttering various words, reflecting emotions and attracting opinions of unpredictable temperature. The senses with which we experience the festival and its art.
The anniversary Malta recycles the past and creates a collage of its thirty editions. Let this be a new portrait of the future.
We are very happy to invite you to the 30th Malta Festival: a celebration of the festival and its audience, of the city and of art. Write it down: 19 to 28 June 2020. Coming soon is an outline of the programme, and the full programme and tickets will be available as of 19 May.
The festival is supported financially by the City of Poznań, the Minister of Culture and National heritage and the Marshal Office of the Wielkopolska Region.