Milano Design Week, 5 things to see today / 2

Outside the usual Fuorisalone routes and overlooking the recently built Residenze Carlo Erba, the decorated facade of Toilet Paper’s house is a popular selfie destination for tourists and Milanese alike. Now Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s Wunderhaus is opening its doors to the public. The occasion is the birth of Toiletpaper home, a “brand dedicated to projects for the home”, the latest step in the now well-established collaboration with Seletti, which over the years has given birth to a powerful collection of mirrors (perhaps the most famous), rugs, chairs, lamps, vases, and gadgetry with cases, masks and so on, which, together with much more, can be found in the house, that also represents an opportunity to visit a typical bourgeois building in Città Studi. Obviously, not all of them are furnished like this, and almost none of them actually have chickens in the courtyard. For those who want more, there is a brand-new work by Cattelan at the Piscina Cozzi and an exhibition at Hangar Bicocca, but there are pigeons there (and not very live ones).

On a wall in the "hall of waste" of the Museum of Science and Technology, Álvaro Catalán de Ocón exhibits the
the first carpet from a collection made with recycled PET for the Spanish company Gan Rugs, dedicated to the Ganges, the sacred river that boasts the sad record of being the most polluted in the world. Plastic Rivers No. 6 is an impressive and highly accurate textile map taken from Google showing an area of 100 km, with different heights of yarn for different mountains, plains and rivers, made by Indian craftsmen on a digitally printed design. It shows the potential of recycling, but above all it denounces the Western trade for its contamination.
The carpet is on display at the Museum of Science and Technology, Via San Vittore, 21. (Loredana Mascheroni)

ADI Design Museum brings its historical archive to the Rho Fiera halls, with an exhibition dedicated to the object that best sums up the value of design: the chair. Since 1954, 34 chairs have been awarded the Compasso d’Oro prize and more than a hundred have received Honourable Mentions. To enhance this immense heritage – its inexhaustible archive of objects and stories – the museum has commissioned architect and researcher Nina Bassoli to curate “Take Your Seat”, the exhibition representing the institution at the “supersalone”. Four of the five sections of the exhibition are in fact distributed among the pavilions of the fair, with the addition of an “extra” part inside the new museum.

Bassoli investigates for ADI human landscapes, rituals, behaviours, and some of the fundamental issues related to chairs and our time. For each chapter she has asked for the contribution of an architect or architect – Fosbury Architecture + AbNormal, Anna Puigjaner, Matilde Cassani, Davide Rapp – who with video installations explore the topics in a complementary way to the selection of chairs.
The set up, designed by Alessandro Colombo and Perla Gianni Falvo, succeeds in the complicated task of isolating visitors from the hustle and bustle of the “supersalone” and immersing them in a unified environment, without having to separate the exhibition space from the context of the fair. In each island of the exhibition, visitors can choose their own path and look at the masterpieces of Italian design with complete freedom. (Salvatore Peluso)

At Palazzo Citterio, in the heart of Brera, Dior Maison is showcasing the work of 17 artists called upon to reinterpret one of its iconic emblems: the Louis XVI medallion chair that Christian Dior chose to seat guests at his fashion shows. The "sober, simple, classic and Parisian" character of this chair is distorted by, among others, Constance Guisset's reinterpretation of it as a folding chair, nendo's transformation into a large curved tempered glass armchair, and the Dutch artist Linde Freya Tangelder's reinvention of an aluminium version with three legs and a sloping seat.
Palazzo Citterio, via Brera 12.

The unmissable exhibition at Supersalone. Halfway between a Salone Satellite and a Dubai Global Grad Show, this year the Fair will fill the gap of almost two years of distance learning in universities and theses discussed online. At the Lost Graduation Show, students from all over the world can finally present their theses live (and what thesis!) and to the best possible audience. The projects touch the most disparate themes, from humanitarian to climate emergencies, from domestic well-being to new forms of life in nature, in the form of product design, interior, textile, fashion, graphic and interaction design. They must all be seen, one by one. Among the most scenic, surprisingly, we finally find two Italian schools: Politecnico di Milano with Micromort, a speculation on the ‘value of death, and the prototyping of a car by IED Milano in partnership with Suzuki.
Rho Fiera, Halls 2-4 (Marianna Guernieri)