FRANCESCO DE MAIO
CERAMICA DI VIETRI
ITALY
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FRANCESCO DE MAIO
CERAMICA DI VIETRI
Handcrafted and hand-decorated majolica tiles reinterpret the historical memory, innovate and create redesigning the ceramic according to new tastes and trends...
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Utopia by Design.
Design Biennale - London
The black and white majolica of Francesco De Maio at the first London Design Biennale
In the exhibition scheduled from 7 to 27 September 2016, Ceramica Francesco De Maio is the technical partner of the White Flag installation created by the La Triennale Design Museum in Milan.
Twenty white flags as a contemporary metaphor for utopia. This is how La Triennale Design Museum interprets Utopia by Design, the theme of the first edition of the London Design Biennale, scheduled at Somerset House.
"The white flag is the symbol of surrender. Speak the same language to everyone. Its meaning is universal". Thus the curators Silvana Annicchiarico and Giorgio Camuffo recount the conceptual premises of the White Flag installation, "Its appearance implies a ceasefire: under the protection of the white flag and the space of dialogue that this creates, the different positions can find modalities of coexistence where the existence of one party does not involve the submission or extinction of the other. Like all utopias, even that of the “surrendered” world yearns for something unattainable".
In support of the white flags, a floor of black and white majolica arranged in such a way as to represent, like a pixel, the geography of the world. The Italian tiles chosen for the flooring of the installation to represent the world in this prestigious global event in London with thirty-five countries are those handcrafted by Ceramica Francesco De Maio.
The majolica tiles in 10x10cm format in glossy white and glossy black brushstrokes are thus the protagonists in London of the “White Flag” conceived for the Triennale Design Museum by curators Silvana Annicchiarico and Giorgio Camuffo in synergy with twenty young designers and architects.
The curators selected 20 Italian designers who were asked to draw a white flag "loading it with a sign, meaning, meaning to communicate the value of truce, of surrender, identified by the curators as a contemporary metaphor of utopia, no longer understood as a gesture of construction, but as an act of deconstruction ”, explain from the Triennale.
The designers have rethought the symbolic white flag as a utopian emblem of global truce. The flags will initially be placed on the world map at the heart of the installation, but each day of the Biennale, one of the flags will be removed and replaced by an object chosen or created by the designer. All this to instill a sense of urgency, even of emergency, for the chosen places marked on the map.
A geographic map of the world, therefore, acts as a backdrop for the installation that is all in progress. A work in progress that only at the end reveals itself as a landscape of planning and object, «a sort of offertory generated in the time of the truce».
The designers of the project:
Antonio Aricò; Mixed Associate; Marco Campardo and Lorenzo Mason; Cristina Celestino; Matteo Cibic; CTRLZAK Studio; Francesco D’Abbraccio (Studio Frames); Folder; Alessandro Gnocchi; Francesca Lanzavecchia (Lanzavecchia + Wai); Lucia Massari; Giacomo Moor; Eugenia Morpurgo; Rio Grande (Lorenzo Cianchi, Natascia Fenoglio, Francesco Valtolina); Sovrappensiero Design Studio; Alessandro Stabile; Studio Gionata Gatto; Studio Zanellato / Bortotto; Gio Tirotto; 4P1B Design Studio.
The London exhibition with a new layout and a new graphic layout was adapted ad hoc and brought to the spaces of the Palazzo dell'Arte of the Triennale Design Museum in Milan scheduled from 16 June to 27 August 2017.
At the center of the project always the White Flag as a design metaphor for utopia (theme of the London Biennale) and as a vehicle to convey a symbolic message: "the value of truce, of surrender, no longer understood as a gesture of construction, but as an act of deconstruction", as explained by the two curators Silvana Annicchiarico and Giorgio Camuffo who have observed over the course of history a “saturation” of models that are mutually exclusive in the attempt to prevail over one another. "It's time to take a step back."
An attentive, profound exhibition that makes you think.
