African Film + Art Festival
In September 2023, Providence (Rhode Island, USA) hosted the fourth annual African Film + Art Festival (AFAF), which was organized by PVD World Music. The five-day event is dedicated to both contemporary African cinema and traditional music.
Live performances by the likes of kora virtuoso Yacouba Diabate from Burkina Faso and many others create an atmosphere of cultural resonance. Local organizations such as the Rhode Island Council for the Arts, the Providence Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism, and the Southside Cultural Center of Rhode Island have supported the festival since its inception in 2020. The event has become firmly anchored in the cultural calendar of the East Coast. In summer 2023, organizer Chance Boasgave gave its brand a sustainable visual identity for the first time, with a new logo, new visual language and a new house font: the Afrikan version of the inclusive font family Pangea Text.
Pangea Afrikan is an important milestone in the efforts of its designer Christoph Koeberlin to create a sustainable and unifying typeface. Continuous linguistic expansions challenge Western conventions – as more often than not the character sets of most successful fonts only represent European and American alphabets. Thanks to the Afrikan version, Pangea now supports popular African languages such as Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Lingala, Mende, and Umbundu as well as some indigenous languages of North America such as Lushootseed or Navajo … and therefore the languages of at least 430 million people.
The new identity aims to establish an authentic cultural brand that playfully stages its cultural orientation. The capitalized English name of the festival features Latin characters used in African languages, such as the T with a hook (Ƭ), which is used in the Atlantic language Serer (Senegal, Gambia, etc.) and the R with a slash (Ɍ), a character from the Kanuri language. Even though the communication and the name of the African Film & Art Festival in Providence are in English, the characters of the African languages indicate the direction of the cultural event.
Osmond Tshuma, founder and designer at South African design studio Mam’Gobozi Design Factory, describes the reason for chosing Pangea Afrikan Text as follows:
Choosing a font was vital because we required one that could also handle Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, or Lingala movie or song titles. Additionally, the icon we had created for the event was geometric, and Pangea Afrikan complimented it quite well. A perfect match.
