In spring 2021 a project named "NAVIRE AVENIR" was initiated for the immigration cause. PEROU has launched a shipyard aiming to design and float by 2024 a sea rescue boat, a place of welcome and care, a manifest and witness place, a collective work which articulates the engineering specific to the shipyard and the multiple echoes that such a project questions and requires: legal formalizations, artistic translations, driving force of the idea itself and of its realisation.

As a member of ANRT, I collaborated voluntarily with the project from its early stages. The aim was to think, imagine and design typographic solutions to communicate inside and outside of the boat.

Kultur ensemble (Institut francais Palermo and Goethe-Institut Palermo) has provided the project a residency in palermo. Palermo is Italy's most ethnically diverse city, one seemingly at ease with its melting pot status. The root is pro-migrant policies of Leoluca Orlando, Palermo's long serving mayor, and one of the supporters of this project. He was first elected in 1985 and retired in 2022. He turned the city into a model of pro-migrant inclusivity (to read more).

Today's multicultural life of Palermo suits its background very well. Palermo has always been in the junction of different cultures. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Saracens, Germans and Spaniards have all left their mark on Palermo. While walking in the streets you cannot ignore the multilingual inscriptions. Either historic ones or the new vernacular ones. It is with these inspirations and under the hot sicilian sun that "Palermu" was born to cover several languages. Apart from Latin Now it covers Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Palermu is the sicilian Orthography for Palermo.

League gothic was already chosen for the latin typeface and as a part of the identity of the project. Such typefaces were used in civil rights movements by african-americans.

It was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company in 1903. The company went bankrupt in 1993, and since the original typeface was created before 1923, the typeface is in the public domain and its computer font made by "The League of Moveable Type" is accessible under open source licence. To my great surprise I found a very similar wooden type in Palermo's fine arts school archive during my research and just before starting to design its Arabic counterpart.