Testa e Croce – Exhibition’s catalogue
Cultural, Design
The ADI Design Museum was created to showcase the entire repertoire of projects in the historical collection of the Compasso d’Oro award, created in 1954 by Gio Ponti to promote the quality of Made in Italy design. It is the highest honour in the field of industrial design in Italy.
Parco Studio has worked on the layout of the Testa e Croce: le convergenze parallele del design/Heads and Tails: parallel convergences of design catalogue, an exhibition under the overall curatorship and creative direction of Italo Rota.
This catalogue is itself at the centre of the exhibition, physically because it is shown under the symbolic Cervino in the exhibition setup, and also because it is meaningfully the heart of the philosophy by Italo Rota.
As the exhibition is divided up into 5 sections, Parco Studio has represented it by splitting up the catalogue into 5 sections and for each one it has studied and designed a different grid and layout to show the contents.
The introduction has been written by Italo Rota, about the concept and the idea behind the exhibition: “this is a comparison of two entities, with which to take ideas, create objects with which to build new interiors and to fill our backpacks; in the near future we will probably be a little less Swiss yet the objects will always reveal their distant and mysterious origins.”
Then, the volume has two main sections: the Swiss icons and the Italian icons.
Both sections, the first one curated by Riccardo Blumer and the Italian one by Alessandro Pedretti, espace the concept of defined categories and “avoid precision” as they identified categories which are the most inaccurate to have been done. They “do not want to recognize functional materials and typologies, but interpretations of life, its complexity and, why not, its unawareness”.
For those two sections Parco designs two different visual systems that are made to support the two different approaches of each curators and of their own way of design.
Infact, the Swiss section is all in black and white with a grid of plenty of images that explains the numerous iterations of the Swiss design classics. On the other hand, the Italian section pages have larger and more colorful images, in order to describe the personality that distinguishes each object.
In addition to these Parco develops a third grid for the under 35 section, one dedicated to the Swiss designers and curated by Laure Gremion – about how sustainability is no longer a matter of choice, designers are now actors of change, conscious of environmental issues and determined to design functional, sustainable and practical products.
The last section of the exhibition is devoted to Italian design under 35 and curated by Erika Petrillo – the setup represents the point of view of the condition of its sector, characterized by vulnerability and precarious employment, but also a conscious sort of enthusiasm. Parco Studio presents each single project and each single designer in this section fully described with words and images, to highlight their values and ideas.