12 April 2014

For some reason, when speaking of this seventh occasion on which the Triennale Design Museum is being organized, it feels only natural to make a comparison with the time, in 2010, when it was curated by Alessandro Mendini, perhaps the finest and most exciting version of the event, from which Beppe Finessi is now trying to steal the thunder. Il design italiano oltre le crisi. Autarchia, austerità, autoproduzione (“Italian Design beyond Crises: Autarky, Austerity and Self-Production”) is also the direct product of a voracious mind, endowed with surprising erudition and capable of coming up with an immense range of proposals. This too is an exhibition that presents an accurate, continuous and well-lit panorama of the national situation, in which the hiatuses of context between the three As of the Italian title almost vanish. In contrast to Mendini’s attempt to shake things up, however, Beppe Finessi’s exhibition not only has, but is intended to have a calming effect, beginning and ending with two dark, crucial rooms, a thesis and a hypothesis, one huge and one little: the entrance in which “large” examples cutting across disciplinary boundaries are assembled, and the last one devoted to new technologies. Come to think of it, there is another A appropriate to this exhibition that is missing from the title, that of autoanalisi, or self-analysis. After all, the use of “crises” in the plural includes not just public and political matters, but also the more private and intimate ones with which our design is all too familiar. In Finessi’s view, design has apparently come out of these crises redeemed, in peace with the past and, in some cases, even with standardized production, which in many of the pieces on display bears witness to the Italian third way, offering an alternative to the forced choice.