You are an independent curator, an advisor and the director of The Good Life Italia magazine. What unites these three activities?
Curiosity, which has always led me to be interested in very different things, and which now, especially with
The Good Life Italia, is opening me up to new worlds and new knowledge. All three activities then are based on work that has content at its center: whether it's the content of an exhibition or consulting to a designer, you from the outside draw a line of what could be future evolutions. And finally creativity, which is the area in which all three of these things move.
AND what is it instead that differentiates them? I imagine that between a cultural institution and a company there may be divergences in terms of objectives: would you say that your work changes in interfacing with one or the other?
Of course, work always changes. If you curate an exhibition for a state public institution, you have to think about what they call large public in France, so a popularized cultural product with a strong pedagogical framework that allows the widest possible audience to understand the subject of the exhibition, whether it is dedicated to a single designer or a movement. A different narrative capacity is needed, one that keeps insiders and outsiders together. Projects for companies, on the other hand, can be of various kinds: cultural, communication or commercial, and this obviously changes the approach completely. Let me give an example. A few years ago I started a collaboration with Buccellati, a historic jewelry brand that wanted to approach the world of design through tableware, which they had been producing for years. My proposal was to have four interior designers work with the existing collections, with the goal of showing how those objects, which recalled a milieu of ancient nobility, could instead be very contemporary when used in a completely different way. This then led to a rationalization of their commercial catalogs. The commercial part remains very important in design, because design has a direct commercial purpose unlike art, which is perhaps more free of the connection to the market.
In which of these two worlds do you feel freer?
It depends from project to project and company to company. In fact, it depends on the people. You can be extremely free in a company as in an institution if your interlocutors are people with whom you have a dialogue, an affinity. In contrast, there is never freedom when your interlocutor has no real open-mindedness, or is very dogmatic. Of course, stakes are always there, but it is always the people who make the difference. So far, the jobs that have gone well, that have been a joy and maybe then generated other things, have always been related to a very good relationship with the people who were there, to the harmony that was created between me and the team of the company or the institutional reality, whatever size it was.