AlpiTypes: letters images traces

This graphic production, frequently of outstanding quality, for the most part consists of posters, books and magazines that represent a largely unknown cultural asset. The authors of these items formed part of a lively and diverse cultural environment that absorbed and creatively developed European trends of the time.

Students at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano have taken on this topic and translated it into contemporary form, starting from what are in part only fragmentary traces, such as incomplete alphabets.

The exhibition displays selected historical materials, either as originals or as reproductions. They invite visitors to rediscover a hidden graphic heritage, a network of unexpected connections, forgotten forms and typographic design techniques that, even after almost one hundred years, retain an astonishing expressiveness and topicality.

The main part of the exhibition, located on the third floor of the Kunsthaus, is dedicated to projects by the students, whose work succeeds in reinterpreting and shedding new light on a graphic heritage that has scarcely been explored to date.

AlpiTypes pursues an innovative approach that combines historical research, digital reconstruction and design practice. This “typographical archaeology” is not limited to the mere recovery of the material evidence of the past, but further proposes a lively and creative reactivation, one that is adapted to the present day.