Puppet Theatre

The Mendini-Abet Laminati partnership dates from the 1980s when the company began printing Studio Alchimia designs on its laminates, then applied to furniture and kitchen surfaces.

This year’s Milan Design Week featured a new project based on collaboration between the Mendini brothers and the firm – a puppet theatre set up in the garden of the Triennale. Conceived as a semi-permanent installation – for two years – it expresses the company’s desire to explore installations with a longer lifespan than usual, avoiding a waste of energy and materials.

Set in the shade of a large tree, the theatre is a brightly coloured open space in dialogue with the colours of De Chirico’s fountain. Indeed, Alessandro Mendini solid references to Italian painting, which underpin his work and imagery, could not but produce a measured relationship with the neighbouring work.
The blue bean-like seating forms a circumscribed child-size space and a puppet show will bring the theatre to life every Saturday in good weather.

Once again, the Triennale proves to be perhaps the city’s most comprehensive museum. Adequately sized spaces, a particularly fortunate position – in the only park in the city centre – and farsighted management that has turned it into a space on a par with the most advanced museography mean it can provide a varied offer to a broad public, exploiting all the spaces available – although the garden now seems a little too full.

Alessandro and Francesco Mendini
Teatro dei burattini
Giardino della Triennale
viale Alemagna, 6 Milano