Chiara Alessi: I’ve known you for eight years, we’ve been living together for six and we’ve got two children, I reckon you can’t lie to me about the stress and the excitement that the arrival of the Furniture Fair has always given you. But maybe this year it’s a bit different?
Odo Fioravanti: Yes, for the first time I am disorientated by the amount of things that there will be. Up until last year I was a strong defender of the polyphonic nature of Milan design week but this year it seems a bit difficult to defend it. Usually, during the lead-up to the Fair I am quite anxious to find out who has done what and how but this time instead I feel like I am about to announce a couple of things – that I think are important – in a stadium full of people shouting. I don’t want to criticise this shouting but I have some confusion in my head. I’m sure that when I’m going to the fair everyday all this will fall into place.
Chiara Alessi: There is envy among colleagues also in design, even between designers. Of course we’re talking about feelings that are totally human, harmless, perhaps less for the subject of envy than for the object... Who do you envy? And why?
Odo Fioravanti: I envy those who don’t do much work because they can afford to. Right from the start I had to work a lot and design lots of things to build up an economic base for my studio and my life. Instead working less and producing less sometimes creates a better image, more rarefied and sophisticated. But let’s say I’m getting there.
Chiara Alessi: What about those who present 20 or 30 new projects at the Salone, what’s your impression of them?
Odo Fioravanti: The complete opposite. I kind of ask myself what’s better, for a moment, when I see some previews of the Salone with loads of objects. They seem like ships armed with canons and they make me feel like I just have a firework in my hand. I know these feelings are a bit schizophrenic: I would like to do less, I would like to do more, but I think these are feelings that all designers have. What to do, how to do it, how much to do are the incessant questions in this job, that I think are impossible to escape.
Chiara Alessi: And then you don’t send out newsletters, you don’t do any kind of special publicity, you don’t even try and hang out with the “right” people...
Odo Fioravanti: To sum up what has happened to me in the past in three steps: 1. I tried it, 2. I made an effort, 3. My conscience is clear: it’s not for me. The right people are hard work and I like to move forward with serenity. I end up thinking that asking for attention is a bit pretentious. I prefer using social media where someone who doesn’t want to listen to you can just unfollow and exclude your voice from the background noise. It seems more “ecological” in the sense that it “consumes only what it needs”.
Chiara Alessi: How is it that being close to you I have the impression that a retweet from someone who counts or 2,000 likes for a project is worth more in terms of gratification than a review in a nice magazine?
Odo Fioravanti: The success of a design on social media works in a way that can’t be compared with attention from the press. Here’s an example. Recently I developed this clutch called Ivy made using 3D printing and sold by Maison203. We had incredible success on social media and for me it was a new thing. Given that this company also sells online each “like” in just a few seconds can be transformed into a purchase. In a short time it can go from an unknown product to a well-known product then right up to a sale. Something unthinkable ten years ago. And then the “like” is a confirmation, a pat on the back, restorative for the ego of the designer and creatives in general that for obvious reasons are always seeking approval. If you work and that is all and no one ever shows any appreciation what’s the point? The artist appreciated only after his death is a dangerous distortion. The artist wants more than anything to be understood, while living.
Chiara Alessi: Can you take advantage of Domus to say what you’ll be doing for Design Week 2016? This year you’re at the Fuorisalone, is that right?
Odo Fioravanti: Yes, a project I’m very happy with developed with Land Rover to accompany the presentation in Design Week of the new Range Rover Evoque Convertible. We decided to represent this car’s attitude to terrain by designing three boards inspired by it. The project is called Freeride and involves the creation of a longboard for asphalt, a snowboard for the snow and a surfboard for water, that are the three favourite terrains of this SUV. The result changes the perception of the car that becomes also a kind of board to use in free riding. In an installation that will be presented in via Forcella 7 at the Spazio Click, the car and the three boards will be presented on angled surfaces that face each other with an evocative video mapping. A kind of dialogue between all these projects and the car that inspired them. It’s really interesting the contact with Land Rover and with Gerry McGovern Chief Design Officer of Land Rover: we quickly built up a great relationship and a lot of mutual respect.
Chiara Alessi: Talking to Paolo Casati of Studiolabo, founder of fuorisalone.it he complains, rightly, that nowadays the expression “extrasectorial” is bizarre in as much that everything is designed and has its own perfectly good design requirements, therefore why should a car be extrasectorial, even though it is not really “furniture” in the true sense.
Odo Fioravanti: I think like everything it’s a case of how not what. If a car is presented in Milan Design Week it has to temper it’s obvious need for communication and address a certain public with the desire that this public has to see interesting designs. This is what we have tried to do with Land Rover this year.
Chiara Alessi: But you will still be a “Fair animal” from Monday to Friday at Rho. Why is that?
Odo Fioravanti: It’s my job. I design products that are produced and sold and the Fair is the celebration of these products. I get up and go to the Fair happy and excited. I will see my products, meet my friends, producers, designers. I will see the state of the art of one of the sectors that my studio works in. It is a strongly ethical question for me: to be there and support this system that I believe in. Be there in person with my feelings and not just my products. Then I go back to my bear’s cave...
Chiara Alessi: What happens when the party’s over on Sunday?
Odo Fioravanti: A certain feeling of emptiness, a bit like the day after graduation. And inside a childlike “I want more...” Usually, to get out of this state I throw myself into my work and start to think perversely about the next fair...
Chiara Alessi: In the midst of a world advertising design “oddities” that underlines at the end or at the beginning of every communication: “... Not another chair!” You are the one who actually designs “another chair”. How do you feel about that?
Odo Fioravanti: Dunno. I think that there is a typological racism against chairs and they are accused of being too many. Nobody gets worked up about the number of forks or windows (anyway there are more forks than chairs). The thing about chairs is that there is one waiting for you everywhere: in everyone’s home, in the waiting room at your hairdressers, at your lawyer, in the church, your mother-in-law’s house, a high-class restaurant and a grotty bar. For each person there are a hundred chairs waiting and sometimes they wait in vain. I design chairs because they seem to me kind and wise objects and they can wait for everyone, even you. And then chairs are a profitable business and there is no need for philosophical explanations to say that I live off the royalties and they make a great reason for designing them. Four years ago Starck announced that there was no point designing chairs any more. A week later he presented half a dozen new chairs at the Furniture Fair. It’s easy to deduce the moral of the story. Anyway, not to be outdone, this year I am presenting three new chairs at the fair. A wooden chair for Verywood that is called Halo because the back is a circle of curved wood that creates a kind of halo around the sitter. A product full of nice details that I’m pleased with. Then with Pedrali a bistro chair in plastic called Dome that has a curved, comfortable back like a cupola. A chair with a complex development that comes in four versions: with or without arms and with or without perforations in the seat and back. Then also with Pedrali a chair with a plastic seat that will be added to the already successful Babila range.
Chiara Alessi: And so, just between us, a good reason to design more and more and more objects, if not for the world, for you...
Odoardo Fioravanti: Or maybe for them. I would say for me and them.
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