Last year, at Superdesign Show, the Superstudio event for Design Week, I curated the immaterial but real sculptures exhibition  by Flavio Lucchini, a magical and unsettling experience created with Alvise Braga Illa's company Sense - immaterial Reality, founder of TXT e-solutions software company and Sense-immaterial Reality. An innovator able to cover new ground who moved among the first in bringing the Immaterial Reality where it could satisfy new functions. Three questions for him to find out what we can expect tomorrow.  

The boom of virtual experiences that put us in front of the coronavirus isolation has made even more current experimentations and applications of technologies that allow us to overcome the physicality to replace it with intangible presences as exciting as those experienced in first person, even if through a new dimension. All the more true and necessary when the work takes place in smart-working and choices and purchases do not allow to be on site, as it happens with fashion, art, design...

A live conversation to share knowledge and perspectives between Gisella Borioli, CEO Superstudio Gruop, and Giulio Cappellini, Art Director and Istituto Marangoni Brand Ambassador.

Instagram live on Thursday 30th April h 5.30 pm at IstitutoMarangoni_Milano Design | Superstudiogroup profiles.

In English.

In Milan everyone remembers that April 2000 where in an unknown via Tortona, in a disused factory, a surprise alternative and almost playful way of presenting the design complementary to what the Salone del Mobile did with its trade fair with an important commercial function arose. Thus begins the adventure of Gisella Borioli in design in the new Superstudio Più, with the complicity and the adhesion of her friend Giulio Cappellini, entrepreneur and open-minded talent-scout . Artribune wanted to make the point with an interview with the founder.

Twenty years have passed since the creation of Superstudio Più and the first design presentation, with Cappellini and a series of young designers who later became stars. What are the memories you are most attached to?

I remember with surprise when I called Giulio Cappellini, with whom I had previously collaborated for my Donna magazine, to see the portion of the delabré factory just bought by General Electric. It was just over a month before the start of the Salone del Mobile 2000 in which he thought to show the new products of Cappellini in a booth as usual...

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...