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16/04/2020 | DESIGN, PEOPLE
THURSDAY'S INTERVIEW

ALESSANDRO GUERRIERO. DESIGN BEYOND THE PANDEMIC

Since he created Alchimia, the movement that in the 70s created the counter-design breaking all the rules, has experienced the many facets of the designer’s profession, he wrote, taught, invented, built, designed, helped, entered the museums of half the world and dedicated himself to many initiatives in order to help with art-therapy the weakest, the marginalized, the invisible. In everything he is guided by a strong focus on social. We asked him:

- After this pandemic, what will happen to design?

For a long time many people asked me almost daily what would be the future of design, art, architecture, aesthetics, ethics... To reply I had equipped myself with a glass sphere in front, bought at Ikea, and I must say that since then I was much more believed.
So I said, for example, that we would go from paranoia to schizophrenia, from production to reproduction, from meta-theory to linguistic games, from utopia to heterotopy, from hierarchy to anarchy, from alienation to decentralization, from design to chance, from metropolis to counter-urbanization, from authority to eclecticism, from synthesis to antithesis, from price to no cost. 

Since he created Alchimia, the movement that in the 70s created the counter-design breaking all the rules, has experienced the many facets of the designer’s profession, he wrote, taught, invented, built, designed, helped, entered the museums of half the world and dedicated himself to many initiatives in order to help with art-therapy the weakest, the marginalized, the invisible. In everything he is guided by a strong focus on social. We asked him:



- After this pandemic, what will happen to design?


For a long time many people asked me almost daily what would be the future of design, art, architecture, aesthetics, ethics... To reply I had equipped myself with a glass sphere in front, bought at Ikea, and I must say that since then I was much more believed.
So I said, for example, that we would go from paranoia to schizophrenia, from production to reproduction, from meta-theory to linguistic games, from utopia to heterotopy, from hierarchy to anarchy, from alienation to decentralization, from design to chance, from metropolis to counter-urbanization, from authority to eclecticism, from synthesis to antithesis, from price to no cost. And I told everyone that if they wanted to know what design would look like in the future, they had to take every word I said, analyze it, shrink it, caption it, paint it, enlarge it and finally reassemble it all casually in a thousand square meters in the vertigo and in the desire to have a small truth.
However the pandemic has changed the answers.
And so we say that the genres of classic design have always been based on the idea of "goods": objects, furniture, tools, things and architectures built with machines or by hand, more or less in series.
Until now, the industry has worked, for better or worse, according to all possible combinations and has reached all points, situations, the most distant markets in the world: real industry, fake industry, industrial craftsmanship, craft industry.
But the traditional production system must've hit the skids and this pandemic accentuates its fate. His hypothesis was to generalize wealth through technology, and thus to achieve the utopia of widespread well-being.
Reality says instead that inequalities have increased: evidently the ideology that supported the pervasiveness of that productive system was not the one declared, but the underground one of a marketing and a finance that have always worked in reality to increase the wealth of a few.
If we were to make a benevolent hypothesis towards us and the world, I would say that perhaps the time has come for a very different kind of goods, ideology, aesthetics, utopia, work, productivity, trade.
The theme is that of the "philosophical neo-goods", which leads to think of models, methods, processes, objects, radically different from those related to the old project of consumer design.
If I try to imagine the objects of this "neo-goods", I see them as light, discreet, psychic, anti-mechanistic, almost evanescent and formless, objects to use and command with voice or breath: "objects-not-objects", a virtual commodity that gives the bodies a non-virtual dimension. Because the physical isolation of the pandemic has also shown how painful the theme of remaining always  virtually connected but physically disconnected can be.




- Hard to define you professionally. Who do you think you are?
Feel everything in all ways, live everything from all sides. Be the same thing in all possible ways at the same time.
Each of us is more than one, he is many, he is a prolixity of himself. Far from me I exist.
I have created in me various personalities, I create personalities constantly. And if you want, I tell you with a kind of Poetry found. Found in the dictionary of my existence, of course.
I told you about our value choices
I worked in this jungle only with our imagination
I built intensive objects
I have spoken several times of degrowth
I had a symbolic and perhaps also ideological attitude
I was afraid I wouldn’t make it
I worked with classic detachment
I launched the Compasso di Latta
I said next year we won’t know what to do
I gave everything of me
I made a lot of mistakes
I met The Velvet
I’ve done a lot of "bright" things
I decided some time ago to be a painter, gallerist and "critic" at the same time
I built objects as prototypes hoping that someone will produce them to infinity
I’ve decided to suffer all the consequences
I thought I’d express all my split-ego
I saw Babled, Giacon, Almeida, Mendini make their ceramic self-portraits
I dealt with the problem of purist aesthetics
I designed 100 events in 100 locations at once
I made the auction of 50 hands for Sacra Famiglia
I made several exhibitions at the Triennale with projects of marginality
I got 34 pages on DDN free
I made the Gypsy church with the leftovers of the world at Superstudio
I’ve worked with 1000 people, at least
I chatted with the Chinese in Paolo Sarpi
I saw Alda Merini die
I launched "ScuotiMi" for the earthquake victims of Abruzzo
I saw the "Portuguese" climb over the boundary wall
I've done so many things that I don’t even know...






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