Atelier Biagetti: God

The project by Atelier Biagetti in the latest edition of Milan Design Week completes a trilogy. After “Bodybuilding” (2015) and “No Sex” (2016), “God” is the third instalment of a coherent and unified project enshrining an implacable and irreverent vision of contemporary society.

  The three instalments, curated by Maria Cristina Didero, become places for reflecting on issues that correspond to so many obsessions of contemporary culture. Themes identified through careful and critical observation of the modes of living in ourselves, in others, and in our homes and possessions. The first installation was bound up with the excessive cult of the body, hence the increasingly stereotyped idea of ​​beauty today. From the body we pass with “No Sex” to the fundamental element of Freudian psychology, in which sex lies at the centre of all our thoughts. From this observation Atelier Biagetti seeks to imagine how the theme can be fulfilled in a playful and surreal staging extending from negation to erotic allusion.

God is the third instalment, somehow embodying the heritage of the two previous ones within a system that critiques the blindness of the senses. So in this new project luck, money, paradise, the will to win and happiness become the matter and materials of an artistic and design reflection. It gives life to objects that are decontextualised in the manner of Duchamp and allude to oneiric dimensions ranging from tax havens to luxury supermarkets: a glass table supported by a gold turnstile, a wall lamp that evokes the closure of a safe, a chair interpreted as golden swing, and a suitcase that becomes a floor lamp.

Each single installation is designed as a place where the viewer is involved through the emotions and the senses. The aim is to build up a scene, devised as a film set, which surprises and enchants: true decompression chambers for our experience of everyday life, both real and virtual. These are aureate installations, absolute and surreal, reminiscent of the compositional perfection of a Kubrick movie set.

For Laura Baldassarri and Alberto Biagetti, design becomes an instrument for emotional engagement. It loses its twentieth-century configuration defined in the balance between form and function, and becomes an aesthetic, poetic, emotional place in which to establish spatial, physical and social relations. An approach that builds on the radical design of the '80s and now, as then, is critical of what is produced by industry. We perceive the urge to overturn the concept of “hyper-beauty”, to which we have subjected design objects because of our computerised and digital indulgences, with the idea of ​​restoring dignity to tactile materiality and the sensorial perception of objects. The same care is lavished on both idea and execution, combining an artistic, creative and conceptual approach with an obsessive tendency towards the construction and fulfilment of the work.

These occasions are characterised by being both installations and performances. This attitude seems to engage directly with the twentieth-century avant-gardes, yet at the same time to rest on a cultural tabula rasa.

3–9 April 2017
God
curated by Maria Cristina Didero
Atelier Biagetti
Piazza Arcole, 4 Milan