01. GRAV
My first aesthetic experience
With my mother at the GRAV exhibition curated by Luciano Caramel (20/30 September 1975) on a boat navigating on Lake Como and offering the best of kinetic art.
02. CENTRO CULTURALE RS
My earliest art memories come from my father
He was a flower designer and art lover who founded the Centro Culturale RS in 1967 promoting artistic and cultural initiatives in his working environment -a flower shop in Como- combining his passion for art and flowers in a singular way.
03. GIANNI COLOMBO
Gianni Colombo “Luce/Ombra + X” at Centro Culturale RS in Como
Thanks to Gianni Colombo's works the thought that the world could be different creeps into my consciousness. The rediscovery of his “environments” -as an architecture student- made me definitively abandon the static and schematic view of the space.
04. ICO PARISI
My black-and-white portrait by Ico Parisi
With his wife Luisa, Ico Parisi ran 'La Ruota' in Como until 1995, which was a gallery/shop, a cultural cenacle, a crossroads of a typically Italian world in which art, crafts and culture in the broadest sense coexisted.
The ideal space.
05. MUNARI
My name written by Bruno Munari
Bruno Munari was a great observer and an ironic artist-designer. His ‘Travel Sculptures’ certainly inspired my research on souvenir objects.
"Travel Sculpture is born with all the typical characteristics of the modern era: it is low-cost, it is practical, … it can suite the modern wandering both in his house and in his travels. … once exposed, it doesn't need big spaces and it can also express a private cultural dimension". Bruno Munari
06. CORRADO LEVI
My favourite professor
A rare intellectual, his uncanny perspicacity and his contemporaneity have affected my point of view, opening it up 360°.
“I am an Italian with a multilayered education: as an architect I was an apprentice of Franco Albini and Carlo Mollino, as a writer I was a disciple of Karl Kraus and Erik Satie, as an artist I learned from many different generations of artists – from Arte Povera I assimilate the language, from Transavanguardia I take in the freedom, of the graffiti artists I wish I had the street to work in, and so on”. Corrado Levi
07. TRA I CORPI
The red line of my architecture thesis is deduced from the works of contemporary artists, performers, architects and designers who have taken an interest in the people and the places of their experiences, imagining, constructing and reconstructing the environment in which they live by transforming the fixity of their behaviour and their relationship with the objects that surround them.
08. BRAVA ALLA MUNARI
The encouragement of Beppe Finessi, mentor and supervisor of my thesis in architecture, which was anything but architecture!
09. The birth of MICHELANGELO
Michelangelo entered the art world from the very beginning. We went part of the way together, in a sort of 'cross-fade' between normal and 'creative' life. Now he is an emerging artist.
10. From Architecture to Art through Design
I thought I had made a liberating jump from Architecture into Art by attending a master degree in contemporary Art at the Sorbonne in Paris, but instead I found myself interlacing all disciplines in one!
My learning experiences have had a strong aesthetic imprint on me.
11. BOSCO NATURALE-ARTIFICIALE
An artwork that deeply marked me
With Gino Marotta’s “Bosco Naturale-Artificiale”, originally created in 1967, the new Galerie Italienne space opened in the East of Paris in 2005, and this is where my professional life began.
12. MoMO Galerie
In 2010 I co-founded the MoMO Galerie together with artist and photographer Romaric Tisserand. A non-profit art space in the window of an electrical supplies shop in the center of Paris, a permanent, 24/7 exhibition space where the main focus was the interference between the artwork and the commercial space, achieved by the “hijacking” of window-shopping reflexes by a process of discovery.
13. PIECES OF EVIDENCE: Today clothing, tomorrow buildings
What drives my curatorial practice is the possibility of not being restricted by a discipline
This exhibition is a tribute to these ventures transcending the bounds of fashion, art and creation, to explore uncharted frontiers.
14. GREAT DESIGN Gallery
“Made in” means nothing anymore. Overdesigned products desperately aim to simultaneously comply with and bypass the standards by which they are defined while the pretended success of a product is a sad count of online likes and retweets. On the contrary, “made for” is a label that matters and has been a driving force of Margherita Ratti’s GREAT DESIGN Gallery since its opening in September 2014. Weltgebraus
15. PILLARS
What a great project!
PILLARS by artist Antoine Espinasseau are utopian objects. They go on the floor, on the wall, they suggest a column, surround a plant or can be used as containers...a freedom of use and an almost totemic status that filters through references recalling the radical utopias of the 1970s.
16. LAKE COMO DESIGN FAIR
Today we are all overloaded with information, we are all victims of it, overloaded with products and overloaded with the over occupation of space. At LAKE COMO DESIGN FAIR we restart with a few things, chosen one by one, with care, to suggest a state-of-the-art on contemporary design.
17. CARRUBA
Carruba by Giuseppe Arezzi kicks off a new collection of souvenirs in homage to the Mediterranean
Alessandro Mendini said, “Objects must fulfill, and at the same time transcend, instrumental boundaries, in order to become small and discreet priests of the many daily rites that contemporary experience also needs... The aim is to immerse the cold and violent consumption of things in a narrative flow, evocative, psychic, and emotional.”
