Besenzoni brings sea reflections to the Fuorisalone
An installation for Milano Design Week 2025 celebrates the experience of sailing between open sea and light, made unique by the innovative character of the Manta helm seat.
Frieze Studios and Gucci commissioned and produced three short movies that have just come out. They narrate and celebrate the Second Summer of Love, a music-driven counter-cultural phenomenon that exploded at the end of the 1980s. According to the current art direction at Gucci, which has dedicated recent advertising campaigns to the late 1960s, when the original Summer of Love took place in San Francisco in 1967, we are now living in the era of Guccification. This has motivated the famous fashion brand to embrace contemporary art and take a good look at youth culture and its translation into mass culture.
For the first Summer of Love, as many as 100,000 people united to reject the conformist and materialist values of modern life in exchange for an emphasis on sharing and community. The second Summer of Love took place in 1988 and 1989, with the start of the rave scene in the United Kingdom. Euphoric unlicensed parties were held in empty warehouses across the UK, where acid house music fused dance beats with a 1960s psychedelic flavour. Ecstasy was both the mood and the drug of choice. Not even Thatcher-era police were able to contain the tidal wave of emotional mass congregations of party-goers.
Jeremy Deller (1966) is an English conceptual artist and a direct participant in the second Summer of Love. Now, 30 years later, he has presented his version of the story to people who weren't around to experience it. He went to an A level class in London and described the origins and development of acid house. He exhibited archive photographs and video footage, placing the rave parties in relation with the Industrial Revolution, the miners' strikes and other socio-political changes. Deller's one-hour movie, Everybody in The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 is the documentation of this encounter between him and a group of young people in 2018, children of globalisation and multiculturalism. The movie camera records a performance in which the students are seen in their day-to-day appearance. Not only do they listen to Deller's words, but they also recite Karl Marx and compose electronic beats. Spontaneous questions and a planned narrative structure allows the class to discover an era when it was possible to dance without filming and without being filmed. There seems to be much distance between now and the time when shared effective participation in the moment made the encounter of a multitude of individuals a political happening.
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Into a Space of Love by Wu Tsang (1982) is a 25-minute look at New York's queer and black discothèque communities. The storyline is lost in the constant alternation between past, present and future. The film shows the clubs and city of New York as a space of love, but not without suffering and battles. The presenter of a local radio and a female figure surrounded by screens and technological devices are the vehicles toward the dimension between public and private. Both call into question the position of the white spectator who observes and monetises the bodies and movements of people who have suffered and have found on the dance floor their battle-field. In order to enter into the intimacy of the spaces, the movie camera moves through decorations made of silver strings, similar to a scene in the six-minute film Puce Moment (1949) by Kenneth Anger, an American experimental film maker, and the oldest living observer of the occult spirituality in youth movements. There is an inside and an outside. Straddling the boundary between the two, the heirs and survivors of the night tell their personal stories. Their voice is direct, showing passion not dissimilar to religious spirituality.
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The third and final film is the half-hour Distant Planet: The Six Chapters of Simona by Josh Blaaberg. It catapults us into the unreality of Italo-disco, a phenomenon of illusion, evasion and evanescence that really happened, but escapes all possible rationalisation. It is an all-Italian story that illustrates the need to flee from 1970s terroristic destruction, the desire to enact a future in which to lose oneself and thereby forget. Some years ago, the Italian artist Chiara Fumai warned us about the repercussions of the falseness of Italo-disco, but still today, we are unable to break its magnetic spell. Blaaberg's story mixes diverse cinematographic genres from documentary to science fiction in order to give the vintage heroes Simona Zanini, Fred Ventura, Alberto Stylòo and Francesco Rago one more chance to experience the illusion of immortality.
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The scenes in England, New York, Italy have in common the 30thanniversary of Centro Pecci. The forces of the second Summer of Love are still going strong in the exhibition “The Museum Imagined – Stories from 30 years of Centro Pecci”. Upon exiting the viewing room, the museum's history blends with the imagery of the three movies. Our nostalgia for the legendary past of the 1980s swirls confusedly with our disillusioned anxiety about the future, a cocktail that lead to us longing for an imminent third Summer of Love.
- Exhibition title:
- Second Summer of Love
- Film by:
- Wu Tsang, Josh Blaaberg, Jeremy Deller
- Commissioned and produced by:
- Gucci and Frieze
- Venue:
- Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
- Address:
- Viale della Repubblica 277, Prato
- Opening dates:
- 6th – 25th November 2018
A new world of Italian style
The result of an international joint venture, Nexion combines the values of Made in Italy with those of Indian manufacturing. A partnership from which the Lithic collection of ceramic surfaces was born.
