Zënzar
Client: Zënzar.
Work: Graphic design and photograpic session for the rock band Zënzar.
Year: 2009.
Photography: Mutante & Úrsula Prego
Zënzar is the pioneer band of rock music written in Galician and have been travelling from stage to stage for more than twenty years. In 2009 we had the pleasure of creating the design for his fifth album, entitled “A Tribu” (“The Tribe”). According to them, the title refers to their own “tribe” but with a twofold meaning:
On the one hand, the term “tribe” makes reference to their tribe, i.e.: the tribe of rock&roll, their friends, their people, restless supportive friends and fans that unconditionally follow them to their concerts. On the other hand, the title also alludes to that other tribe living in small villages, to the tribe to which they belong, to their parents, families and ancestors. Summing up, the allusion includes the people from the country, rural people, who also make up a kind of tribe, a Galician tribe gradually dying as times goes by, a tribe that loses their costumes, wisdom and ancient ways of life.
To achieve this symbolic duality that Zënzar wanted to express, we played with various elements. On the one hand, we used the iconography of extant Galician Celtic petroglyphs to build several elements of the design of the album. Some of them are the icons on the cover and on the inside leaflet, designed to resemble those inscriptions carved on the stone (the petroglyphs). The icons present each one of the members of the band as if they were carving the petroglyphs on stones thousands of years ago in order to tell us and/or immortalize their costums, their way of life, symbolising, in this way, the band, their rock tribe. Another element added and relevant for this purpose, is Zënzar’s logo designed with the form of a petroglyph, i.e.: a spiral "Z" and used for the posters, the web page and the T-shirt. This design reinforces that recurrent idea of a tribe.
On the other hand, we included another element of tribal simbology: the totems, an element proper to the culture of the natives of North America, understood as the origin of a certain human group that is descended from that totem. Although the totems have nothing to do with Galician culture, they establish a significant parallelism with Zënzar since this is a ‘Galician tribe’ that plays Rock&Roll, a music originated in North America, like the totems…Moreover, this totem, made up with their own instruments, expresses the idea of the roots of the band, the roots of their tribe.
