Client / Abet Laminati / SuperSuperfici - The Spirit of Memphis (reloaded)
Year / 2021
Exhibition / ADI Design Museum, Milan, Italy
Abet Laminati and its design curators Giulio Iacchetti and Matteo Ragni celebrate the forty years of Memphis with a collective research project. The main topic: rediscovering the meaning of being radical nowadays.
How Memphis design would look if Ettore Sottsass Jr and his associates had founded the movement today, forty years later? How would they have given substance to the radicalism that distinguished the group during its six years of activity from 1981 to 1987?
Superficiale is a collection of furnishings, accessories and lighting that compose a deliberately alienating domestic landscape.
The project will be presented during the exhibition “SuperSuperfici - The Spirit of Memphis (reloaded)” in Milan from 4h to 24th September 2021.
There is a design that reassures and gives certainty, but there is also one that disorients, deliberately disrupting our points of reference. We look at this second approach with Superficiale. The obsessive graphics (reminiscent of the language of Memphis but also of Superstudio) occupy every visible space, generating a microclimate so exasperated as to be almost ironic. In contrast to their functionality, these pieces do not ask to be used but to be looked at, like souls aware of the sense of alienation they inspire. A small laboratory of the uncanny, where things blend in with their skin and in some way desecrate Memphis itself, as well as Superstudio, used not as a tutelary but as a sheet of paper on which to mess around freely.
Credits
Concept and design / Martinelli Venezia
Production / Abet Laminati (Surfaces: digital print HPL + HPL standard ), Emmanuel Zonta (Objects)
Curators of Super Superfici / Giulio Iacchetti, Matteo Ragni
Photos / Max Rommel