https://www.behance.net/gallery/113188913/Celebrating-the-impermanence-of-life

We were commissioned for the third consecutive year to develop and design the campaign for the Torelló Mountain Film Festival 2020. The central theme for this year’s festival was Tibet. Our campaign talks about the impermanence of life through the Tibetan ritual of building and dismantling sand mandalas. 

For every edition, we have taken into account the time context in which the festival will be held. For this particular year, time could not have been more significant. The Covid 19 pandemic touched us all. Our lives, our livelihoods, our health and our happiness. It tested us, exposed us and humbled us. But beyond anything else, it brought us together. By exposing the fragility of the world, the pandemic offered us an opportunity to make it a better place. 
Rather than letting Covid-19 monopolize the concept of this latest edition, our proposal draws lessons from our shared experience. Aware of how fortunate we were that the festival could take place at a time when the cultural sector has suffered so much, we interpreted the theme in a celebratory way, focusing on the values that Tibetan monks preach through their ritual practice. 
Beyond aesthetics, creating a sand mandala is an intricate process. It requires millions of pieces of sand and many weeks of painstaking work. The brightly coloured mandalas are characterised by ancient symbols. The monks work tirelessly, carefully dropping grains of sand into an intricate pattern. The mandala represents the world in divine form: beautifully designed, perfectly balanced, but ephemeral. Always in a state of flux. 
Calling the community to meditation, the monks spend weeks working together on a single mandala. Once finished, it is swept away and thrown back into the river, a blessing to the world. This Tibetan tradition brings humanity together, a healing process that tells an ancient truth: in life everything is impermanent and material possessions are meaningless. 
Perhaps more poignant now than ever before, our approach to this year’s festival was to formally translate this ancient ritual into a colourful campaign. Created from typographical characters whose shapes are inspired by the geometry of mandalas, the characters are made of uniform sand particles that together form a decorative whole, allowing us to playfully “sweep” the particles away. Vivid hues of red, blue, green and gold interact playfully with each other, bringing the process to life through a series of bold visual communications.