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There are books that collect stories, line them up, find an order, classify and compile lists, trace chronologies and jumps in scale, small revolutions and great changes, from projects to products. Corporate stories are almost always like this. Annotated catalogues of topics, eras, and geographies. Taxonomies. And there are books that write those stories, reinventing the past with an eye to the present and one to the future. New narratives as adventure novels in the discovery of unchartered lands.
Fiction. Molteni Mondo. An Italian Design Story, the volume edited by Spencer Bailey with creative direction by Beda Achermann and unpublished shots by Jeff Burton, published by Rizzoli USA and in bookstores from September 2024, belongs to the second category. A 90-year history rewritten in the present-day, in the large set that, from the compound in Giussano, Brianza, travels across five continents, narrating spaces, processes, pieces, trajectories, legacies and memories. The main characters of the tale are the designers and architects who have left their mark on both the world and the company. Elective affinities.
Words and images pursue each other across the storyboard to weave new storylines. Among the many specially written contributions, from Jean Nouvel's opening letter, detailing the initial visit to the company's headquarters, to the afterword by Jacques Herzog, who identifies Molteni Group as a distinguished family-owned enterprise contributing to Italy's reputation for excellence and tradition, from the portraits of the designers to the parallel story of the Gio Ponti Archives, a national identity legacy and engine and fulcrum of the Heritage collection, everything flows to the cinematographic rhythm of the clapboards. Between the pages, one can perceive the linear processes, the discards, and the unexpected turning points of the plot.
A “Roomscape” imagined by Vincent Van Duysen. Ph. Jeff Burton, from Molteni Mondo by Rizzoli NY, 2024
Roomscapes is one of these, a new chapter in the story. There is no narrative here; there are two previously unseen works, photographed by Jeff Burton. Vincent Van Duysen and Ron Gilad designed two installations for the book, two areas based on escape rooms - real or virtual environments in which to hunt for elements, riddles, clues and solutions to find the vital key, essential to escape or find one’s way out of a place. A game, in short, differently interpreted by the hand of the two protagonists. An escape from reality.
The concept of the escape room game originated in 1988 and was attributed to the video game "Behind Closed Doors," but it was in 2001 that the terminology was adopted to define a particular type of video game that literally involves escaping from a room. Later, escape room was used to define all video games in which the player must solve puzzles of various kinds, regardless of the setting or end goal. Vincent Van Duysen and Gilad created two autonomous spatial environments, with the freedom to imagine symbolic escape rooms based on the Molteni Mondo theme. Dreamlike rooms in which to imagine new worlds.
The theme thus interpreted, recalls the concept of ‘installation’ - one of the most original means of expression in modern and contemporary art - as evidenced by the work of many artists who, in different ways and languages, have proposed their own version of it, according to poetics and worldviews distant from one another.
Lucio Fontana's Spatialism seeks to transcend the illusory space of the work of art and integrate it within the environment, and the Nouveau Réalisme's experiments, such as Arman's waste assemblages, Cesar's compressions, or Christo Javacheff's wrappings, search - within an ‘urban landscape’ - for everyday objects that are then repurposed on the basis of a provocative aesthetics of waste.
And then, the happenings and environmentalism of Pop Art, the collages and assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg, the gigantic objects of Oldenburg: there are many examples that demonstrate how the idea and meaning of a work of art are not completely contained within the boundaries of a canvas or a form. Indeed, an installation involves the particular arrangement of objects and materials in an environment, thus involving different parameters of time and space. Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michel Petry and Michel Archer have written an analysis of the phenomenon as a whole: "Installation, l'art en situation." Here, the authors identify a common denominator for installations to summarize their most salient features in 'theatricality' or "carnaval," as defined by philosopher Julia Kristeva: "It's a show, but without the stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking; a signifier, but also a signified... The carnival stage - where there is no stage, no ‘theatre’ - is at the same time stage and life, play and dream, dialogue and spectacle."
A few broad typological classes can be identified in installations: those that concern a specific site - such as Christo Javacheff's wrappings, those that use media – e.g., Wolf Vostel's video-art, those that are located in provided spaces, museums, galleries and public venues – like Barbara Bloom's works, those that are identified as real architectures – see Mario Merz's Igloos, and those that can be defined as land art, or operations on the territory – as the works of Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson and Richard Long among others.
All with wide margins of contamination between them.
Vincent Van Duysen and Ron Gilad's installations are indeed a case of contamination: they are site-specific as well as true architecture. Vincent Van Duysen imagines a jungle-greenhouse, enveloped in the suspended, liquid atmosphere of the tropic, and surrounded by greenery - to emphasize the connection between interior and exterior, architecture and nature – in which to set some of the pieces from the Outdoor collection. Ron Gilad envisions a mind space, a theatre of the absurd occupied by unusual off-scale creatures, in a white room that plays with lights and shadows: art objects created for an exhibition in Tel Aviv, catalogue pieces designed for Molteni&C, a 3D printed model depicting himself and supporting a Teatro chair by Luca Meda and Aldo Rossi. And a passage, quoted below, regarding his ‘escape room’.
Mind-strolling
Through an allusion
OBJECTivity dissolves
Minds free to expire.
The space was conceived as an anecdote about the fine line between the logical and the absurd. Like floating in a stream of consciousness, reality shifts between states of mind: at times anchored in the known and familiar and at others drifting to the unknown.
At first glance the space seems to be comprised of familiar architectural ingredients – walls, floor, ceiling, door, window and light, all becoming the stage for Molteni Mondo. This internal world is composed of both functional and abstract fragments that include a chair, a daybed, a side table that converse with a selection of art pieces*.
But what one sees is not necessarily what one gets: The front wall and entrance door are no more than an outlined facade. The window, the reflection pool and the abstract vegetation are two-dimensional illustrations made of color, the colonnade is transformed into a pedestal and the secret 'stairway to heaven' is leading to nowhere...
This "Theatre of the Absurd" plays with our perception of reality and suggests an open-end idea of space and objects.
*all art pieces were produced by Molteni for the occasion of Ron Gilad's solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2013.
Main Image: Presenting the “Roomscapes” imagined by Vincent Van Duysen and Ron Gilad. Ph. Jeff Burton, from Molteni Mondo by Rizzoli NY, 2024
To celebrate 90 years of Molteni&C, Rizzoli New York has published Molteni Mondo – An Italian Design Story, a book that is on sale worldwide from September 2024.
The photographer Jeff Burton is known for the cinematic quality of his work: bathers by a hotel pool become a study in saturated colour; tanned bodies are seen at one remove, distorted by mirrored surfaces; a woman’s glance is glimpsed through a car’s rearview mirror.
In the centre of Milan, a short walk from the duomo, is Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi (1888-1967) for the Necchi Campiglio family between 1932 and 1935.
