Heritage Landscapes vol.53
Heritage Landscapes is the Promemoria Group newsletter created to observe the contemporary heritage landscape. Twice a month we share the most interesting news and the most innovative projects, investigating those archival stories that turn an object, a brand or an insight, into a legend.
Between architecture, design, fashion, food, technology. With no limit to our curiosity.
Between architecture, design, fashion, food, technology. With no limit to our curiosity.
1. The Long View
Reagan Ray’s Archive
There’s a corner of the internet where someone has decided to methodically collect forgotten record labels, 1980s action figure logos, and lettering from science fiction films.
That someone is Reagan Ray, a designer from Austin, and his personal website is one of the most intriguing and personal visual collections you can find online.
More than a portfolio, it is a veritable archive of obsessions, consisting of thematic galleries ranging from American railroad company logos to VHS distributors, from commercial signs to comic book lettering: graphic elements responsible for defining and characterizing an entire era.
That someone is Reagan Ray, a designer from Austin, and his personal website is one of the most intriguing and personal visual collections you can find online.
More than a portfolio, it is a veritable archive of obsessions, consisting of thematic galleries ranging from American railroad company logos to VHS distributors, from commercial signs to comic book lettering: graphic elements responsible for defining and characterizing an entire era.
Ray’s approach is almost archaeological: he selects, catalogs, and compares. Browsing his site means journeying through a history of design that cannot be studied in books—not the history of the big names, but the alternative history of mass-produced objects and everyday commercial imagery.
A small personal archive that, taken as a whole, resembles an act of cultural preservation, perhaps seasoned with a touch of nostalgia.
A small personal archive that, taken as a whole, resembles an act of cultural preservation, perhaps seasoned with a touch of nostalgia.
2. Augmented Craft
On view through May 23, Agnieszka Kurant’s first solo exhibition at the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, Variantology, explores the relationship between technology, collective intelligence, and the future of work. The artist constructs complex systems in which algorithms, bacteria, human crowds, and molecules interact, generating hybrid forms in constant transformation, giving rise to quasi-living organisms while simultaneously questioning the dark side of AI. An exhibition that unites the distant past and the remote future to ask us: what if technology could have, and could still, take completely different directions?
3. Seen & Noted
Opening today, on the occasion of the Venice Biennale and the artist’s 80th birthday, the exhibition Transforming Energy is hosted at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Open through October 19, the exhibition aims to create a dialogue between the artist’s unforgettable performances and Renaissance masterpieces such as Titian’s Pietà, which celebrates its 450th anniversary this year, thus forging a union between past and present, the material and the immaterial. Visitors are invited to actively participate through interactive installations, the “Transitory Objects,” designed to explore a form of shared energy that centers on the body and perception.
Credits: Reagan Ray, Galleria Lia Rumma Napoli, Yu Jieyu, Gallerie Accademia, Firenze.
“When I joined the family business, after spending twenty years working elsewhere, I had the opportunity to rediscover its history through the lens of its heritage. I rediscovered the company’s values—values I certainly hadn’t defined myself, but ones I could easily identify with, because they were already a part of me; I had absorbed them within my family when I was a child.”
- Anna Ferrino, General Manager of Ferrino & C. S.p.A.
- Anna Ferrino, General Manager of Ferrino & C. S.p.A.