Rising seas

Due to global warming, the water from the Antarctic thaw has reached Torelló. The speed of the unstoppable rise in sea level is posing a risk to society. Nothing is exempt from its hazardous effects. Every year the Torelló Mountain Film Festival revolves around a particular place in the world. Last year we were commissioned to develop a campaign around the central theme of Tibet. For this year’s edition, our focus was on Antarctica.

With the 26th UN Climate Change Conference taking place in November 2021, climate change is once again top of the agenda for nations across the world. We anxiously await the latest harrowing statistics in a state of quiet suspense; many believe this event to be a pivotal moment in the fight against climate change.

In the past, experts have warned that if the rate of global warming continues on its current trajectory, we will reach a tipping point in just 40 years from which the consequences will be irreversible. They say that if the situation is not reversed, the ice cap will collapse, the glaciers of Antarctica will begin to melt and this will lead to extreme weather events around the globe and an alarming rise in sea levels. 

For this year’s Torelló Mountain Film Festival, the graphic identity is a call to action in response to the climate emergency. Our approach is to raise awareness of the threat of rising sea levels by speculating, visually, on the exaggerated and imminent arrival of water into places where it shouldn’t be; in this particular case, Torelló. What would happen if the campaign media for this year’s Torelló Mountain Film Festival were to have been affected by a brutal and unexpected influx of water?

In collaboration with printing company Gràfiques Copyset, we delved into an extensive exploration of the visual effects of water when it comes into contact with both physical and digital media. For the printed applications we quite literally injected water directly into the rollers of the offset printing machine reels in order to deform the bright orange background in a seemingly natural and random manner. The impact on the final artwork is significant; an abstract watermark illustrates the catastrophic future of rising sea levels all too clearly.

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For the digital applications we simulated the impact of a rapid rise in sea levels, imagining a hypothetical scenario where water might come into contact with the cable’s image transmission. A short circuit created by the presence of water would cause the images to collapse. Water damage is frustrating and often irreversible. The purposely corrupted graphics resulting from a supposed hardware failure are blurry, pixelated and distorted. The message is clear; now is the time for bold collective action.