Xplosiva
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1999
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xplosiva
Happy newcomers
Late ’90s, early 2000s. Bellissimo’s visual production punctuates the events of Turin’s then-explosive clubbing scene. These were flyers — though it felt more like taking flight.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Before the international rise of Club to Club (later C2C), the Xplosiva association animated Turin’s nightlife with sets featuring international guests and artists from its own “clubbing system.” At the time, Bellissimo —still at its early stages— was shaping the visual imagery of that world, producing an almost endless series of flyers to communicate its nights.
Sharp visuals, urban poetry, disorienting questions, and neologisms: week after week, a language emerged and quickly evolved, more interested in provoking than promoting — though the two clearly went, and still go, at the same pace. Passed from hand to hand, these postcards remain part of the collective memory of a generation of the Turin youth of the time, who would come to see that creative intensity as unmatched. And there is more, of course.
“Bellissimo stung me,” “Bellissimo sings a simple song”… At the time, the studio signed its work not only with its name, but with short phrases — maintaining a consistent tone of voice that balanced mystery and irony.
Graphic freedom is, as we know, inversely proportional to budget. But that long season of research and experimentation, soon followed by projects for local institutions and big companies, is still embedded in Bellissimo’s approach today, allowing that evocative, sometimes surreal momentum to surface in very different contexts. With hindsight (and later budgets), it couldn’t have been a better beginning.
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