Local Icons

Seven non-Roman designers were asked by Domitilla Dardi and Giulio Cappellini to produce a collection inspired by Roman icons, revisited from a personal viewpoint and clad with Alcantara. The result is a collection that is both varied and homogeneous, on show at MAXXI.

“June 1958. I’m working with Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, going over an old idea of ours for a film about a young man who arrives in Rome from the provinces to become a journalist.

Fellini wants to adapt it to our times and paint a picture of the “café society” that revels in eroticism, alienation, boredom and sudden affluence. A society that has got over the cold-war scare and – perhaps as a result of that – is prospering once again. Here in Rome, with its mix of sacred and profane, old and new, a mass influx of foreigners and much film-making, this is all more aggressive and sub-tropical. The film will be called La Dolce Vita but we haven’t written a line of it yet. We are vaguely making notes and going around places to refresh our memories. In recent times, Rome has expanded, become distorted and got rich. Scandals erupt suddenly like summer storms. People live outdoors and sniff and study each other, filling the restaurants, cinemas and streets. They leave their cars in the same squares that used to delight us with their architectural clarity but that now look like garages.”

This is a page from Ennio Flaiano’s Fogli di Via Veneto, written nearly 60 years ago as notes for a future film, one of those most culpable of fixing our image of the Eternal City and which clearly continues to mould our mental icons of Rome. Thinking back and seeing the results displayed in the fine “Local Icons” exhibition currently on at the MAXXI, it is curious that this blurred picture of people walking over bridges and past manholes and ruins, this snapshot of the bella vita steeped in silent surroundings of the sacred and the earthly, the constant voices shouting in the streets and the postcard illustrating the symbols of a joyous Epicureanism reminiscent of the film The Great Beauty, should have remained unaltered. Faded perhaps by passing time, it is still the first portrait of the capital to spring to mind but the city has changed greatly, perhaps inwardly saddened despite its natural outward effrontery, while our idea of Rome (and perhaps also that of the Romans themselves?) seems eternal and ever joyful.

The interesting theme of the souvenir was chosen by Domitilla Dardi, curator of the exhibition, and Giulio Cappellini, artistic director of the famous Alcantara brand, which has, since 1972, covered the most prestigious brands with the material of the same name in numerous fields of application – from fashion to accessories, cars, interior design, home decor and consumer-electronics. “Travelling used partly to be about learning what different places had to offer, from art to food, culture and nature. Bringing home a souvenir was like holding onto an experience, conserving an exclusive piece of that world so as to relive our memories from afar.” The theme of the icon is interesting for a not necessarily insider audience but is also inspiring for a design world that for many (a bit like Rome?) still revolves around its historic products, a world that, for at least a decade, has been wondering how to update those undisputed icons with potential new symbols linked to the collective imagery of today.

Seven non-Roman designers were asked to produce a collection inspired by Roman icons, revisited from a personal viewpoint and clad with Alcantara. The result is a collection that is both varied, thanks partly to the material’s versatile properties, and homogeneous, perhaps by virtue of this topos of Rome carried inside us for the past 60 years. Complying with a strongly experimental corporate poetic, the objects on display were conceived more for the vision they bring to the project than as products that may effectively be followed through to an industrial production process. This makes for very free results although the apparent absence of obligations brings other not obvious constrictions for designers whose briefs are mostly dictated by cost and production potential. Different constrictions bring different challenges and the results contain varying degrees of poetry.

Gentucca Bini’s Saluti da Roma is a glove collection, for which the fashion designer has also developed the perfect packaging, reproducing typical Roman (Italian?) hand gestures in a brilliant oxymoron of a marble-like texture and red nail polish.

The Lanzavecchia+Wai duo have created two fine Cupoloni lampshades decorated on the inside with architectural friezes of the domes of St Peter’s and the Pantheon, which in this material develop a 3D effect.

Marta Laudani and Marco Romanelli express their sophisticated take on the sacred/profane pairing via the circus, notebook, cross and wine bottle – beautiful.

Paola Navone applied Alcantara to the most typical memory of any Rome holiday: a red/white polka-dot Vespa with a green seat. This Italian Pop icon has already been promised to the Piaggio museum in Pontedera.

Stefano Giovannoni combined ancient legend with modern-day icon in a collection of smartphone, tablet and computer cases featuring the She-Wolf feeding the twins, achieved with a play of perforations and laser (again, old technology revisited).

Patricia Urquiola also thought of cases and came up with an tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the manhole cover that has unwillingly become rooted in the Roman subconscious, a reminder of the street surface-sound connection. Domitilla Dardi explains: “Renato Nicolini’s Estati Romane initiative brought us Romans a great sense of social belonging and cultural discovery of our city when Rome’s manholes, linked to monumental sewer works dating from Ancient Roman times, became metaphysical music emissaries. Walking down the street, you suddenly heard sounds without knowing where they were coming from. Today, we carry music around on our tablets and so Urquiola’s tablet case, shaped like a street manhole cover, is almost a nostalgic revival.”

Finally, the artichoke, rosary and Julius Caesar – conviviality, church and theatre again but also the typical local irreverence that here really does dress the Emperor as a puppet.

Maxi versions of some of the objects, on show until 7 June, feature on a large merry-go-round that joyfully greets Roman visitors (original and acquired), tourists (from the rest of Italy and abroad), families (many), travellers and commuters. We await the next phase of this fun project which will probably focus on European icons.

01 / 05

Zanellato Bortotto

Paola Navone

Patricia Urquiola

Gentucca Bini

Marta Laudani e Marco Romanelli

until 7 June 2015
LOCAL ICONS. Greetings from Rome
curated by Domitilla Dardi and Giulio Cappellini
MAXXI Rome
Sala Carlo Scarpa

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Local Icons

Seven non-Roman designers were asked by Domitilla Dardi and Giulio Cappellini to produce a collection inspired by Roman icons, revisited from a personal viewpoint and clad with Alcantara. The result is a collection that is both varied and homogeneous, on show at MAXXI.

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