Archivo, Italy, Archivo

When it opened in 1972, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz, became the most influential design exhibition ever held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; at least since Philip Johnson placed a series of metal springs, a propeller, a billiard ball, an ashtray, a hammer, a white plate, a dictophone and another 400 ordinary artifacts on pedestals, raising them automatically to the status of works of art, when he inaugurated his Machine Art in 1934. Showcasing 150 objects by 114 designers and 72 manufacturers, 12 “environments” (4.8 x 4.8 m space installations commissioned for the exhibition), 20 corporate sponsers and a 432-page catalog with 520 illustrations (124 of them in full color), Ambasz’s Italian exhibition established itself as perhaps one of the most ambitious and memorable curatorial initiatives ever in the history of design. (It remained more or less undefeated in that sense, until Paola Antonelli unveiled her Design and the Elastic Mind in 2008, also at MoMA. For some reason, Italy always reappears in the crucial moments of the history of design.)

Still, more than by a question of sheer numbers, Ambasz’s overview of the Italian domestic landscape of those years became milestone because without fault it managed to crystallize a moment of disruption, a turning point, in the culture of design (and of design exhibitions) of the twentieth century. Perhaps like no other country, in the 1960s and 1970s, Italy represented a challenge for those who understood design as a practice that was easy to pigeonhole: professional, formal, direct, coherent, lacking any mystery. But the design scene in Italy was a reflection—an intensified one at that—of a change in material, cultural and productive conditions throughout the world.

“I had read some magazines and seen beautiful products,” Ambasz wrote, “so I decided that we should have an exhibition. It was not until I arrived in Italy that I realized that designers were making objects, but thinking of environments.” This duality—an organic distinction rather than categorical division—was the guiding principle of the exhibition: on the one hand, it displayed a selection of domestic items with formal and technical merits, or with important sociocultural implications (mostly experimental modular systems and adaptable furniture) and on the other hand, twelve experimental “environments,” which focused on spatial, social, technological, media and ecological aspects of design .

In deference to Ambasz—with a small nod—and in the same spirit of challenging taxonomic and display conventions, Archivo | Italia also departs from a selection of design objects of Italian origin to discuss disciplinary boundaries, rehearse spatial arrangements and test institutional limits. Although rather than formulating an immeasurable question about the present and future of design, we prefer to limit ourselves to a specific, manageable and almost prosaic question regarding the nature, function and arrangement of our own space and collection dedicated to the design, at this precise moment, at the beginning of a new direction for Archivo.

From a Mexican standpoint, Italy reminds us of ourselves. We recognize ourselves in the same habit of looking back to push forward, in the tireless moves between tradition and modernity. We share the same taste for the fertile clash between the primitive and the popular, the weight of the history and the hunger for novelty. Looking towards Italy, we also find traces and echoes of the experimental drive and the vocational crisis of the radical designers of the sixties and seventies; with the same fascination for design in its broadest sense, for its mediatic nature, for the tensions derived from technological progress and also certain nostalgia for the enthusiasm with which the future was faced as both challenge and promise. All this resonates in the proposals of the three critical and research design initiatives that have been invited to take part in Archivo | Italia : FIG projects, Salottobuono and Space Caviar.

From the standpoint of Archivo, Italy also represents an opportunity to question ourselves about the nature and mission of our own project and space. More than an exhibition, Archivo | Italia is presented as a case study—as the team from APRDELESP precisely points out in their display proposal, which sacrifices the traditional dynamics of the gallery space for a more flexible format, with different uses and intensities—. Through minimal gestures (couple of stools, opening a small window, offering someone a cup of coffee) we will try out ways to generate and digest information, gather different people and positions, explore the public dimension of our collection. Testing layouts and balances; generating, essaying, scattering, and sharing information, ideas and proposals. All with the same question in mind:

Archivo? How, why, for whom?