On the occasion of the international festival Madrid Design Festival, the Instituto Italiano de Cultura presents until next 14 March the exhibition Alchimia – the revolution of the Italian design.
After Berlin and Milan, this exhibition, a production of ADI Design Museum in collaboration with the Bröhan-Museum, arrives at the Instituto Italiano is the international tour of the first complete retrospective dedicated to the Milanese collective founded in 1976 by Alessandro and Adriana Guerriero, winner of the Compasso d’Oro Award in 1981 and active until 1992.
Alchimia was born in a period of profound social and cultural changes as an open interdisciplinary laboratory, where design, architecture, visual arts, fashion, music and performance are freely intertwined. The result was a dreamy, utopian and provocative project practice that rejected dominant functionalism in order to reinforce the symbolic, narrative and emotional value of objects.
Alchimia’s experience was contributed by key figures of the project culture such as Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi, Michele De Lucchi and many more, United by the same will to overcome the dogmas of modernism and to return to design a communicative and critical dimension. In opposition to the rational and industrial aesthetics inherited from the Bauhaus, the collective developed a vision based on irony, decoration and poetics, redefining the role of the project as an instrument for interpreting the contemporary world.
Through the theory of the so-called “banal design”, Alchimia claimed the freedom to revise forms and styles of the past, opposing aesthetic homologation and industrial standardization. The objects were thus transformed into totemic presences, capable of holding a ceremonial and playful dimension of everyday life, where the project became a cultural act and critical gesture.
This exhibition is organized by the Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid under the auspices of the Italian Embassy in Madrid.