Campaign Exhibition Archaeology Museum

An exhibition like no other

From February 11, 2023 to January 7, 2024, the Chronographe will be presenting an exhibition on archaeological excavations in the Nantes metropolis over the last ten years, designed in partnership with archaeological operators (SRA-Drac, Inrap, Nantes Métropole, Département, Eveha, Archéodunum…). In this context, Nantes Métropole commissioned us to design this communication campaign for their interpretation center.

The exhibition has a dual purpose :

1. To take stock of ten years of archaeological research in the city. This will be done through some fifteen operations (diagnoses, excavations, observations) chosen as representative of the diversity of research carried out in this area.
2. Promoting archaeology as a discipline. This involves highlighting the work of archaeologists and the various specialists called in to analyze the remains (anthracologist, carpologist, palynologist, anthropologist, xylologist, dendrochronologist, etc.), as well as the techniques used in the most contemporary archaeological research.

What’s special about this exhibition is that it’s not necessarily an exhibition of objects. Our approach was to design a poster consistent with the Chronographe’s graphic identity. With one exception: the star of the poster will be neither a coin nor a statue.

The star is the exhibition title.

In a communications campaign, typography can evoke many things in the way it is thought out, posed, animated

The Chronographe logo is a typography in motion, fading, uncovering, building and rebuilding itself, like history, like archaeology. It’s a bit like discovering the word Chronographe underground after a long dig. We don’t have 100% of the pieces of the puzzle; like the archaeologist, we have to reconstruct the name “Chronographe”. For the power of identity, this reconstitution is done without intellectual effort, but rather in poetic form.

For the title of the exhibition, we decided to draw on this bias. We came up with a typographic game that recounts the investigative work of the metropolitan excavations, the reconstitution of the pieces of the puzzle, in a playful way with balance and strength, the network operation, the buried history of the Metropolis, the different techniques of archaeology.

A museum advertising campaign in the Nantes metropolitan area and other museums in the region, using posters, flyers, inserts, etc.