CAM Sugar takes over New York and Los Angeles with poster campaign in collaboration with artist Raissa Pardini.
The bond between Italy and the United States runs deep, with cinema and music often being a common ground, but not only. Think of the overseas success of classic Italian chanteuses, of the many trajectories the cuisines of the two countries shared – from pizza to fettuccine–, or even better to the tight connection Hollywood and its Italian counterpart Cinecittà had in the 1950s and 1960s, when Rome became known as “Hollywood-by-the-Tiberis''.
Hence, it felt just about right to finally make CAM Sugar releases available on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean too.
Raissa Pardini for CAM Sugar.
To mark the launch of our US online store, we took over New York and Los Angeles with dozens of print and electronic billboards to be spotted around the hip and cult neighbourhoods of Bushwick, Broadway, Bedford Avenue and Metropolitan Avenue in NY and the Hollywood area in LA.
For the occasion we teamed up with graphic designer Raissa Pardini, whose Italian background and international music industry expertise (Maneskin, IDLES, Squid, Orielles, Fontaines D.C. and more) seemed just perfect to visually narrate the identity of CAM.
The billboards punctuate the streets of Los Angeles with their colourful design.
Bold, colourful designs meet with a love for Punk and cinematic-informed cut-outs and a thorough study of lettering and typefaces, which were applied with different outcomes on the three designs exclusively conceived for the campaign.
“Working on this project meant I could combine my love for my country, Italy, with that for graphics and Italian soundtrack music. It came as a celebration of things that made Italy a spotlight in the world, which is exactly what CAM Sugar is doing as well now,” told us Raissa.
The three different claims play upon an international rediscovery of Italian cinema from the perspective of one of its hidden treasures: music. Slogans like “Cinema never sounded so Italian” and “Stop watching films, listen to them” were matched by visuals that enhanced said feeling of synesthesia.
The study of typography is at the core of Raissa Pardini's practice.
“The designs are all about what these films embodied visually and musically, but also about taking them into modernity throughout the billboards. We worked hard on getting the references spot-on, including some of our favourite actors and actresses, but also the iconic original fonts. We really paid attention to history with a modern twist.”
The three billboards capture Raissa’s words and approach, with the one dedicated to the vocabulary of Italian cinematica especially working as a display of the artist’s study on typefaces as well as offering a compendium of the volcanic visual output of 1960s-to-1980s Italian soundtrack artworks.
Likewise, the font adopted for the “Cinema never sounded so Italian” design was sampled and hand-drawn from the one used for the artwork of Il Sorpasso, one of the all-time cult flicks of Italian cinema history as well as a flawless example of Italian modern jazz, courtesy of Riz Ortolani.
Camsugarmusic.com is now live in the United States too for the ultimate Italian cinematic experience. Shop here.
The billboards light up the New York subway too.