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Millemila Zero Covers

At the Triennale Design Museum, a thousand copies of the Italian event guide Zero form a large mosaic displaying Italian creativity, combining art, publishing, technology, territory and gratuitousness.

Zero is, for Milan and other Italian cities, the essential free guide to the events, entertainment and culture that the city offers every day. But not only, Zero is also a publishing project with bigger ambitions: to produce culture and not just record it.

And so, the already familiar attention that art director Stefano Temporin and editor-in-chief and design editor Marco Sammicheli pay to the project, published with a different graphic concept every fifteen days, has become an opportunity to generate a sudden swarm of visual imagination.

Last 16 May, Zero was published without a cover but with an invitation — open to anyone on the website — to propose new covers using any technique. The project is named Millemila Zero covers, and in the two following weeks, more than 10,000 people downloaded and used the template.

Meanwhile, at the Triennale Design Museum , a series of live drawing sessions was held, during which 60 prominent Italian illustrators, designers, graphic designers and art directors were invited to produce their covers on site. The techniques used were varied and, surprisingly, only a small percentage of the artists used digital graphics.

There are many collages, such as the one by illustrator Claude Marzotto reconstructing the small mythology of the signs in a long-gone Milan, or another by Vogue Italia art director Luca Stoppini, who cut out typefaces from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to reconstruct the title of the free press journal, signing it with his fingerprint to render it inimitable.
<em>Millemila Zero covers</em> at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan. Installation view
Millemila Zero covers at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan. Installation view
Studio Folp Vs Paperplane used a photocopier to obtain graphic distortion effects in a completely analogous way, while Smog photographed a diorama with an atmosphere that is both circus- and dream-like. There are also tributes to the Triennale building, like the proposal by Walter Wilhelm, who reworked the façade with scraps of paper and leaves. Luca Pozzi proposes a maintenance handbook for De Chirico's bagni misteriosi that populate the Trienniale's garden, while Elsa Jenna creates a kind of playful ink-drawn map of the installation.

Online, however, most of the proposals come from the graphic designers who create flyers for parties and evening events, sharing the aesthetic code of the world fuelled by Zero with other artists.
<em>Millemila Zero covers</em> at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan. Installation view
Millemila Zero covers at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan. Installation view
The sessions closed on 31 May. Around 150 of guest-create covers and a selection of proposals from the website were produced with printers, copiers and laser-cut from the "personal factory" made available at the Triennale by Vectorealism.

And so, in the long wing of the museum, an exhibition was born: more than a thousand copies of the magazine attached to a wall with plasto-ferrite magnets patented by the publisher to form a large mosaic. The impact is impressive. All the artworks are printed in black and white as jackets and the name of each artist appears on an acid green band on every magazine. And, in keeping with Zero's style, the guides are there both to show themselves off and dialogue with the larger show in the next room — TDM5: Grafica Italiana — as well as to be detached and freely taken home by anyone who wants to.
The project is a combination of art, publishing, technology, territory and gratuitousness that goes far beyond the A6 format, creating a network of new faces and established professionals with an approach that is always playful, but never frivolous
<em>Millemila Zero covers</em>. In the foreground, covers by Massimo Giacon, Elisa Macellari
Millemila Zero covers. In the foreground, covers by Massimo Giacon, Elisa Macellari
The project shows a way to design and conceive a free press that reworks the concept of display, while simultaneously ennobling its artistic dimension. The initiative's success can be attributed to a fruitful collaboration between Zero, the Trienniale and Vodafone. Millemila Zero covers closes the Vodafone Open event — a laboratory open to the development of apps which, in 60 meetings from February through May, investigated the effect of technology on art, food, sports, family, design, music, ideas, producing a guest-curated document for each theme.

Millemila Zero covers is a combination of art, publishing, technology, territory and gratuitousness that goes far beyond the A6 format, creating a network of new faces and established professionals with an approach that is always playful, but never frivolous. We amusedly await their next cool move.
<em>Millemila Zero covers</em> at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan. Installation view
Millemila Zero covers at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan. Installation view
<em>Millemila Zero covers</em>. From the left, covers by Wilhelm Walter, Roberta Maddalena, Antonio Colomboni, Claude Marzotto, Ivan Hurricane, Vito Manolo Roma, Massimo Giacon, Elisa Macellari. In the centre, cover by Marco Ferrari
Millemila Zero covers. From the left, covers by Wilhelm Walter, Roberta Maddalena, Antonio Colomboni, Claude Marzotto, Ivan Hurricane, Vito Manolo Roma, Massimo Giacon, Elisa Macellari. In the centre, cover by Marco Ferrari

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