Heritage Landscapes vol.12

Illustration is ephemeral. And it is on this quality that Modern Illustration was born, and fights.

In 2018, from an Instagram account named Ephemerama! a digital archive was born: Modern Illustration. Illustrator Zara Picken, has collected materials of all kinds ranging from 1950 to 1975.

The goal is to make available the artifacts of an ephemeral discipline, often used as an accessory or ornament, but which over the years has carved out a respectable space for itself among the visual arts. Here are colorful pirate ships, simple and complex ideas, playing cards, books, certificates.

The archive is navigable by format or vintage, allowing you to enter the creative universe of famous illustrators or unknown visionaries. The attempt is to put together a more accurate history of illustration, bringing to light the commercial artists who enabled the development of the discipline, and reassessing a tradition made up of illustrators, female illustrators and immigrants of extraordinary talent covered by adversity and time.

More than 400 mostly amateur and small-format films shot between the 1930s and 1980s show the daily life, nostalgia and extraordinariness of these lands and those who had to leave them. There are the Salt Pans of Trapani in 1948, laughter on the beach, lunches, airports, children playing, or images of the funeral of Giuseppina Gonnella, a sorceress healer from Serradarce in the town of Campagna (Salerno), killed in an ambush during a possession ceremony. This is Southern Glimpses: the new section of "Memoryscapes - Private Cinema Online," the platform of Home Movies Foundation - National Family Film Archive.

Internazionale dedicates an article to the book Against erasure: a photographic memory of Palestine before the Nakba. The book, published in the UK by Haymarket books, edited by Spanish photographer Sandra Barrilaro and journalist Teresa Aranguren, bears witness to Palestinian society before 1948, when hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes and lands following the creation of the state of Israel. The photographs come from family archives collected by historian Johnny Mansour, and show a society without walls, made up of football teams, school trips, fishing, handicrafts.

Until June 29, you can discover 40 years of experimentation between art, design and architecture signed by architect Michele De Lucchi in Piacenza's Volumnia exhibition space (former church of Sant'Agostino). The exhibition, curated by Paola Nicolin, brings together experimental objects, prototypes and historical pieces taken from Produzione Privata (the workshop founded in 1990 by De Lucchi and Sibylle Kicherer), the famous "little houses," furniture, sketches, drawings and sculptures. A journey through the stages of a career in which all the architect's ideas are condensed: between attempts to interpret the world, give meaning to things, and capture the spirit of the times.

Credits: Modern Illustration, Zara Picken; Fondazione Home Movies; Archivio Luce Cinecittà, Chora Media; Volumnia, Michele De Lucchi

"A brand has to be solid, it has to be consistent, and it has to take the long view. Because the lives of brands, like the lives of people, are not hundred meters, but they are marathons."

Three years ago, at Legend21 (the main B2B event in Italy related to heritage, organized and created by Promemoria Group), we had invited Mario Calabresi, journalist, writer, Founder and CEO of Chora Media. That day we had the pleasure of asking him a few questions, and he told us about the link between memory and storytelling, and how this link is the real key to give life to a brand capable of lasting over time, and becoming, in this way, legendary.