Despite all the pessimistic forecasts about the upcoming year, Lavazza still hopes that the Mayans predictions won’t actually come true and the world will enjoy the year of 2013. The coffee brand is now working on the calendar for the upcoming year, encouraging public to join in and contribute their own visuals for the piece named Opera Viva, the 2013 Social Calendar. The project has a creative direction of Michele Mariani and Marco Faccio and is signed by the Armando Testa Agency, which managed the previous brand’s art calendars.
Photo: Lavazza’s «Opera Viva» 2013 social calendar, www.lavazza.com (click to enlarge)
The new edition will be unveiled on January 1, 2013 here, and it will feature works by international visual artists, shortlisted from those who will submit their works through digital platforms including Facebook, the brand’s website, Instagram (using the hashtag #OperaViva) or iPhone/iPad application. It won’t be a traditional version of a calendar—now Lavazza turns to new formats and chooses digital. The internationally renowned famous Italo-Canadian digital artist Marco Brambilla will choose the best contributions sent to the project, and then will use them to create a 2-minute digital calendar. He has also outlined the briefs for the creative contributions on the operaviva.lavazza.comwebsite. Here’s the first one: «12:00—2:00AM—JANUARY 2013—I am looking for neon: lights, signs, video advertising displays, anything with movement and color that penetrates the darkness—the bigger, the more epic, the better. This is a time of vibrant but residual energy, which dissipates as we prepare for sleep. Allow this to inform your videos and images.»
“The artist, author of videos that narrate even the story of humanity in a few minutes, has divided the day-calendar in 12 parts where every section corresponds to a month of the year and, ideally, every month corresponds to a time span of 2 hours of the day. The result will be a video-installation of about two minutes that tells of a day expanded in a year, where through the rhythm of thrilling images with a strong impact, the colours used, the sounds (or the silences) will take the spectator into the mental space that usually is associated with the corresponding hour of the day,” says the brand, describing the upcoming work. Starting the very first day of the next year, users will be able to download the calendar and customize it using their own multimedia content.
Last year, Lavazza released the 20th edition of its iconic calendar—for over two decades, the brand taps celebrated photographers and artists to create a stunning art calendar, which renders “that Italian way of life lived, observed or experienced through a coffee that fully represents it in the world.” The 2013 digital calendar is a great endeavour, an attempt to try something refreshingly new and bold, while paying tribute to traditional values.