Women are increasingly becoming the protagonists of events and are, today, even more central to our political, cultural and social scene. Even at this critical moment, many well-known or less-known female figures are emerging, but often their role is not yet recognized as key.
The role of women and the valuable contribution that many of them have made and will continue to make to our events has been reflected in Superstudio for some time.
A few months ago Superstudio launched the first call of its kind for the project DD - Donne e Design (Women and Design), a special exhibition designed for the next edition of the Superdesign Show, a real tribute to women’s creativity, that is also the theme launched by the City of Milan for 2020, with the schedule "2020 Creativity. The talents of women".
Just looking at the most recent productions hosted in the spaces of Superstudio Più in recent months, we observe many female personalities, each one, in her own way, central in events of international standing.
This is the case, for example, of Brenda Bellei Bizzi CEO of the White Show...
The famous citadel of image in Milan reopens on May 4th wishing welcome back to fashion. In complete safety.
It only took the coronavirus to stop the activities of Superstudio 13 photographic studios, for almost forty years pioneer and standard-bearer of fashion and professional photography in Milan. An iconic place that has practically never stopped, hosting extraordinary shootings, photographer-stars and world-famous personalities in continuity. In his 13 studios, those that provided the impetus to the reconversion of via Tortona, from a street that hosted workers' houses of what was an industrial district, in a Fashion and Design District, the creativity of Milan has been meeting there since 1983 recalling in the area the most important fashion companies. After the forced lockdown everything is ready for the fateful May 4th when, finally, we'll start again...
It is customary to draw conclusions at the year end by observing with a magnifying glass what has been and planning the future. But this particular historical period leads to browse in advance the album of memories of events just spent and to make reflections on future ones.
In January Superstudio, with the Salone della Cultura (Exhibition of Culture), smelled of pages of old, new and used books. In February, instead, it was filled with colors with art galleries, national and international, of the Affordable Art Fair and with the bright fashion of already known brands and emerging designers of White Donna (White Woman).
No nostalgia in remembering only so much desire to start again, to become the hub of new productions and to welcome back soon the most loyal customers and the most interested visitors. And the appointments now fixed with the technology of Digital Design Days and Codemotion, with the authenticity of Milanofil, with the immense blue of Denim by Première Vision and with the bold flavor of The Milan Coffee Festival? ...
Since 2000 he lives and works right in the heart of Milan, where the Fuorisalone has simultaneously developed, starting from Superstudio, in the districts. In the former turbine factory, transformed into an extraordinary home and studio, with a panoramic terrace over Zona Tortona, he continuously develops different and imaginative projects, often irreverent, in every direction, from Italy to China. As an entrepreneur, he created a pop-design company that happily follows trends. Showing a trend.
You too, like Superstudio, were the first to understand that the "Zona Tortona" of great disuse factories between via Bergognone and the outer ring-road, could have been reborn with creativity. And even you have transformed an industrial building into a home-studio-exhibition space without distorting it.
In 1998 we bought an industrial building of the '30s part of the Riva Calzoni complex, at the corner of via Solari and via Stendhal. It was a four-storey building, all clad in red brick, inside which were located the turbine test room and offices of the engineers who designed them. On a corner of the building is located a 26 meters high turret that contained a water tank that was pumped into the basement and used for turbine testing.
Even art against the terrible Covid-19. Artists and galleries offer their works for a fundraiser that combines beauty with generosity. Flavio Lucchini is among them.
"Beauty will save the world" wrote Dostoevskij in one of his famous novel, and never as in this moment of fear and uncertainty our eyes would like to be filled with beauty, whether it be a natural landscape, an exotic journey, a work of art…
Emotions that only partially the virtual world can evoke.
When the desire for beauty is combined with the desire to help the forces in the field that fight against the virus that has upset our lives, the marriage is perfect. As for the initiative of Blindarte, gallery and auction house based in Milan and Naples, which launched the "ART to STOP COVID-19" project, an online auction where you can buy at very attractive prices a rich selection of art works both contemporary and modern, antique paintings, art design, drawings, also photography and graphics.
All proceeds support the Lombardy region or the Pascale Institute of Naples, to be chosen by the purchaser...
Today should have been the first official opening day of Salone 2020, with the corollary of Fuorisalone in the city and Superdesign Show at Superstudio. We miss immensely the Milan Design Week, the beneficial tsunami of creativity, the excitement, the curiosity, the sociality, the beauty, the innovation, the vision, the whole world that, for a week, were the life of it. Let’s try to feel again the atmosphere with this 2018 short interview for Sky TG24 to Gisella Borioli, project leader of Superdesign Show. The event is postponed in exactly a year.
Watch the Sky TG24 video
Is fashion art photography destined to succumb in front of the advance of mobile phone photos or realized for the fast communication of the web? Giovanni Gastel, photographer, artist, poet and number one of artistic fashion and top quality image replies. His photos live on the most important international magazines and in the museums that talk about contemporaneity.
The fashion world and its way of communicating, how will they emerge from this period of world blockage? Certainly it will be necessary to think deeply about the ways and times of fashion communication but also the message of fashion itself will have to change profoundly.
Print media, for a century, the only «communicating voice of fashion» suffers from a deep crisis given by the increasingly modest contribution of advertising. The magazines themselves close their doors as a result of this «a dog chasing its own tail»: no advertising no magazines no advertising. The imagined entry into the communication of the web is struggling to recover because of the terrible lack of poetry that these media convey...
He is the undisputed ambassador of Italian design and style in the world. Architect, designer, curator, he launched many young creatives who have now become international stars. With the Cappellini company he produced iconic pieces, still today "long sellers".
He is the art director of Superdesign Show and curator of SuperCampus who will present at Superstudio during the design week 2021.
Cappellini tells us in video how the Covid emergency has in fact created a new way of imagining and inhabiting space, of living and communicating. Renewed habits, smart working, an unprecedented concept of time that we will find in the SuperCampus project, with the best Italian and international design.
Watch the full video on Superstudio Tweb Youtube channel : youtu.be/nZYy4hCViho
We gladly resume here the manifesto of the important furniture industry, made in Italy flagship that like fashion, with the pandemic of coronavirus is in a dramatic situation and that needs quick and wise decisions of the Government. Furniture and design, together with fashion, are symbols of the country and the main actors of photographic, trade fair, cultural, communication and events activity of Superstudio. We join them in this appeal.
"Let's reopen Made in Italy": the manifesto of FederlegnoArredo
"Let's reopen Made in Italy": this is the title of the eight-point manifesto drawn up by FederlegnoArredo, published on Saturday 11th April in some of the main Italian newspapers.
With this appeal to the government the Federation, which represents wood and furniture industry, calls for the safety of workers to be safeguarded without compromising even more the survival of an excellence of our country. We will briefly look at these eight points of the Manifesto by FederlegnoArredo.
• Plan and formalize the reopening date of the entire wood-furniture industry with all its Ateco codes to avoid losing orders and international relations that risk to favor, irremediably, competitors of other currently open countries such as Germany and France...
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.