Client / Institut Culturel Italien in Paris
Year / 2013
Notes, drawings and models inspired to Italy for Italian Institute of Culture in Paris. Once upon a time Grand Tour used to bring people all the way throughout Italy to the deep south, Sicily. Nowadays, I’d like to think that I have done a similar journey but pointing north, all the way to Paris. My aim in fact is to draw and design and sometimes event to craft objects myself. I much prefer the ones that can be used for some purpose and thus I am called a designer. During my residence in Paris at the Italian Institute I was asked to design an Italian merchandising family. I started my research trying to define a project with a strong and direct link to Italy, to Italian culture, sot that it could be a synthesis of the "Bel Paese". The project here presented is the un-coordinated array of objects inspired by Italy. Rather than finished items I like to describe them as travel notes. I conceived them as un-coordinated as they are born from different methodologies: some are formal quotation, others come from simple sensations, perception of different materials or the manipulation of familiar objects. I like to design working on indirect memories such as the roll while moving on the Lagoon in Venice; the chimneys in a painting by Giorgio De Chirico; the big domes in Turin, Florence and Rome; a moka coffee maker; wood grain; a clothes peg… and the list could continue forever. Travel notes. The focus of this project was to steal symbol of the Italian culture re interpret them and transform them into simple object that try to convey a memory, a distant echo of belonging somewhere. Some of the objects I designed have been developed with craftsmen and artisans in different Italian cities and with different expressions. The glass, for instance, is made in Vicenza, the toll in Palermo, the sun glasses in Sorrento, marble is from Comiso. Other objects have been rapid prototyped, they create undefined forms, representative of one single idea. I love to call this approach un-coordinated as it attempts to harness and metabolize all the slight differences and sensations of such unique a culture that can only be described as Italian.
Credits
Concept and design / Vittorio Venezia
Collaboration in the Project / Giorgio Laboratore