Alttra

ALTTRA IS A SPECIAL PROJECT. AND IN THIS CASE, BOTH THE NOUN ‘PROJECT’ AND THE ADJECTIVE ‘SPECIAL’ ARE PARTICULARLY RELEVANT, BECAUSE OF THE TRUTH THEY CONTAIN.

Nadie’s conceptual approach to brand development is unquestionably indebted to our connection with art and culture. Since our years of association with La Fábrica, with whom we have a multitude of shared projects and a natural connection between the culture we love and the search for excellence in everything we do, our way of creating brands has a lot to do with the ways in which culture creates and cultivates identities and audiences. And our link with this project in its most embryonic stage, when they are still little more than a horizon, a dream for their creators, far from documents, connects with that ‘red thread’ that connects the identities we create and takes them a little further.

Alttra is a non-profit project aimed at bringing contemporary art of the highest international quality to the Balearic Islands, ‘to place it at the centre of the lives of its inhabitants and visitors’. Providing the selected artists with ‘unusual challenges, unique contexts and unrepeatable conditions both for the production and exhibition of memorable, newly created works and for the adaptation of existing works to appear in a new light, from and through places, spaces and situations specific to the archipelago’, as the project’s presentation manifesto on its website states.

Its promoters are Rosario Nadal (international expert in contemporary art and advisor to public and private collections and institutions), Blanca Cortés (lawyer specialising in intellectual property, art law and partner at the Roca Junyent law firm) and Bartomeu Marí (curator, writer, former director of MACBA, the Lima Art Museum and the MMCA in Korea, among others). Their previous relationship with Nadie, the fruit of other connections and conversations, generated the bridges and affinity from which the commission arose: to give name and image to something that, in a world still shaken by the last echoes of the pandemic, sounded at once like a dream, ambition, quality and depth. Building an identity firmly rooted in the codes and global references of its promoters.

The naming design project had all the richness, passion and constant reward of a path shared with a team with such a dazzling cultural background. We were looking for identity in its deepest, most essential sense. Global scale and local roots; conceptual depth and initial questioning; attractiveness and staying power… The list of needs, the requirements that we all built together, grew throughout the process, making it richer with each step we took.

The result, ‘alttra’, is a name that speaks of otherness, of difference, of a will to openness and abstraction, of a path that aims to describe itself, fleeing from direct references and foreign models. Integrating languages, phonies and diverse territories without enclosing or excluding. A naming that defines a project that aspires to be ‘other’, to not look at itself in any mirror, to leave the defined, the established frameworks and spaces, as can be seen in the first artists and projects on which the institution is already working. Relying on a word with clear and deep roots but at the same time re-constructed to incorporate its own differences, such as the symmetry between its two central TTs.

The design of the corporate identity sought to take what had been achieved with the naming process even further, generating a visual universe that, based on the foundations of the minimum, would lay the foundations of a solid aesthetic territory, easily identifiable with the international artistic universe in which it was destined to coexist. Black and white, typographies in perspective, renunciation of aesthetic elements, crude typographic games, make up a language determined to show a different perspective, an open and moving space in which the voluntary scarcity of style is undoubtedly the great visual style proposal of the project.

The result, a project identity that, besides being profoundly defined by its content and its creators, is transmitted in a conceptualisation of great capacity, defined, ‘sharp’, and of clear radicality, capable of acting as an interpreter of prestige and excellence from its first steps.

Website project: https://www.alttra.org