Introducing the new Domus archive image: a conversation with Michele Tranquillini

“More than making beautiful drawings, it's all about bringing out unexpressed desires”, Michele Tranquillini says. A popular illustrator, Tranquillni is a well-known presence on the pages of Domus, and the one who has created Un mare di sorprese – An ocean of surprises, the new image of our digital archive.

The Domus Archive, for example, according to Tranquillini has a dual nature: on the one hand it has the purpose of collecting and preserving, on the other a “lighter”, inspiring nature: the nature of a place to explore.

“Soon an idea of landscapes has taken shape, of something pleasant and fun, caves, seas in which you dive and ‘fish’. An idea of methodic and scientific research, but also of ‘fishing’, of being surprised by things that touch us unexpectedly”. From this has also come the idea of those comic-strip scenes where characters dive from cliffs and beaches made of magazine covers and re-emerge enthusiastically holding up their newly-fished Centre Pompidou original report.
The core of the work has been first of all going beyond clichés. “Various conversations with the editorial board” Tranquillini recounts, “made me leave certain initial ideas apart, about what I believed was essential in working for Domus: the need for certain symbols, certain visual languages, the presence of already existing graphics. Of course, we kept the idea of building something with the covers, the most striking and iconic visual material characterizing the heritage of Domus Archive, as a reference.

The creation process became a creative journey, “starting from images of fountains, waterfalls, and then arriving at the image of rocks and landscapes pushing their roots deep down into a sea full of surprises”. A process of moving away from and coming close to ideas, and then reinterpreting them so freely that a custom font had to be developed for the image of the Archive, starting from the sketchbook where the whole story had originated. 

Tranquillini started studying as an architect, then changed, went on to study illustration, then became art director of a large advertising agency, before working as he does now on his own communication projects. “And my ten years at the agency” he says “have taught me a lot about why we do certain things. I learned the value of consistency, of listening to what is required, to the context”. “I am really fascinated by the power that certain quick drawings have” Tranquillini says, “They are an instrument for dialogue”, something he says has been increasingly missing in his work, and also what he tries to reconstruct.

Producing quick prototypes, very sketchy ‘visual things’, becomes a top priority, to keep a dialogue open, addressing and integrating even the confusion that could initially result from such approach. “Until the words are not visualised, the risk is to get lost: I then work on a sketchbook, the pages are photographed and sent out. Feelings are captured from the first reactions, and these feelings are then put in a more formalized presentation. It is from there that a dialogue then starts”, an interpretation, a shared construction gradually shaping the project. Tranquillini's references and inspirations have also evolved over time. In the beginning there was Hugo Pratt, then slowly Saul Steinberg appeared: “When I was at the agency,” he tells us “I had like a vision. When asked whether I dreamt over the next ten years of becoming the boss of the agency or Saul Steinberg himself, I immediately answered: ‘Steinberg!’. But the discourse is even broader, this work actually has the beauty of being able to draw inspiration from anything: from a wrought iron ring as much as from modern art, from illustration as much as from old maps”.