Heritage Landscapes vol.7

Telling the whole history of art (or almost) on one page. The goal? To trace and identify the future of Web Design.

A futuristic city. Then fires, caves, and among colorful forms come hieroglyphics. Here the design of a Madonna made of mosaics composes and decomposes as we pass, indicating the arrival of a new awareness of forms.

The project, launched in late 2019, is a virtuoso example of storytelling and visual imagination. Through moving elements, giant letters and shapes, we quickly traverse the history of art to the movements of Web Design. Thus moving down with the mouse wheel we arrive at Giotto, the Impressionists, Rothko and Pollock. Up to the present day, with the impact of iOS7, and recent design movements.

The goal of the Niika studio was to show the potential of Web Design applied to something free and complex. The result is an immersive, almost tactile journey into how humanity has approached the problem of representing what it sees, imagines, and feels.

How do you tell the World? The Gianni Minà Digital Archive, created in collaboration with Archivissima, recounts sixty years of life as a reporter, under the banner of stories, social commitment and public service of one of Italy's most important journalists. A flow of progressive insertion of film and paper material, edited and unpublished, that becomes an intellectual legacy and a bridge of knowledge between old and new generations, making us lose ourselves among dreams, thoughts, reflections on the past and the future.

From April 10 to Sept. 15, 2024, the Design Museum Brussels will host a 600 sq. m. exhibition investigating the legendary typewriters, murals, animated films, and diaries resulting from the collaboration of Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon and the Italian company Olivetti. The curators, Marcella Turchetti and Paola Mantovani, put in dialogue pieces from the museum with a selection of the historical heritage of the Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti, exploring three decades of work and correspondence, artistic experimentation, poetry and enterprise.

What we call beauty always arises from a vision, but it is accompanied by an infinity of invisible gestures, and a knowledge made of living sap, distilled by time. Fornasetti, on the occasion of Design Week 2023, has created three collections that combine the visionary combination of images, silk-screen printing, and craftsmanship, making delicate eighteenth-century gardens rise in polyhedron shapes, geometries, roses, and sea worlds. The syntax of making is the video that introduces the collection and refers back to the research inside the Fornasetti Archive, going through each document, sheet, nameplate.

Credits: Niika, Webflow; Gianni Minà Foundation; Design Museum Brussels, Olivetti Historical Archives Association; Fornasetti.

Archives are a place of wonder. And Archivio - The secret light is a window from which to observe them in all their beauty. In 2022, on the occasion of Milano Design Week, we presented the teaser of the project, created by FontanaArte, Promemoria Group and Alto Piano Studio: a small manifesto of our work that starts from the gaze of archivists, keepers of memory and discoverers of signs, to tell how the history of a brand is intertwined with its present and builds new trajectories for the future.

The video is a journey through photographs, letters, technical drawings and unpublished documents, in which light is the driver of the story and the Fontana lamp by Max Ingrand the gateway to FontanaArte's archival treasures.