It’s such a surprise when a city that has never called itself a design capital has suddenly something to say about it. The reason for this unexpected vitality is offered by two exhibitions that Maxxi dedicates to Italian designers gone abroad. After “Design Destinations”, the showcase exploring the creative outcomes of young Italian designers migrated to Eindhoven, the Roman museum focuses on the previous experience of radical design to celebrate one of the undisputed maestros of that fortunate, unconventional season: Gaetano Pesce.
The exhibition, emblematically called “Il Tempo della Diversità” [“The Time of Diversity”], offers the opportunity to dive into an inventory of projects, sketches and products documenting Pesce’s huge yet transversal production. Born in La Spezia and based in New York since the 80s, Pesce has always preached the deconstruction of boundaries between architecture, art and design, expressing through his artworks the breaking up of vertical and monolithic knowledge.
However, it’s when it comes to political dimension of his works that the exhibition unveils unexpected connections and intensity. Each piece of art, in fact, explores in its own way the concept of difference, starting from the critique of rationalism in architecture (“Pugno all’architettura”), to the reconsideration of home partitions (“Manifesto per una casa elastica”), to the celebration of female equality as the most urgent political issue (the historical “UP 5&6” series, but also the re-contextualization of Malala Yousafzai’s speech at the UN in Maxxi’s courtyard).
Pesce’s quest for originality represents, first of all, a celebration of the psychical diversity that imprints us all, and finds in figurative language a spontaneous and immediate means of speaking to a wider public. And when it comes to design, originality cannot but rediscuss the idea of series, offering a cue to reconsider the heritage of recent trends in international design, with a particular reference to Dutch design – and here is an intriguing connection with “Design Destinations” – which recently reintroduced the seed of craftsmanship into contemporary design.
Organized around seven thematic sections – Not Standard, Person, Place, Flaw, Landscape, Body and Politics – the exhibition distinguishes itself for an innovative set-up. All the projects, in fact, are distributed on 40 mobile panels that can ideally be moved from one section to the other, calling into question the cataloguing made by curators Gianni Mercurio and Domitilla Dardi. Pesce himself invites the visitors to accomplish a small subversive gesture: “You are kindly asked to liven up with your physical presence Gaetano Pesce’s elastic objects, to impress your impulse, to watch them while they auto-determine”. Which is nothing but another tribute to diversity and its means of expression.
