Concept
Exhibition curated by Aldo Colonetti and Valentina Fisichella
Exhibition project: Matteo Vercelloni
Multimedia project and live performance: Ex Anima
Production: ADI Design Museum – Compasso d’Oro
Catalogue edited by Aldo Colonetti, Valentina Fisichella
and Luciano Galimberti
The ADI Design Museum – Compasso d’Oro is presenting a cultural project dedicated to Caimi, a company with an international vocation yet firmly rooted in Lombardy and which, 75 years after its foundation, offers a reflection on its working method, updating it and presenting it as a development model for the near future.
“Feeling Good. Caimi design per il futuro” is a non-celebratory exhibition and a narrative focused on the company’s DNA. The intention is to indicate the line to take for the future, not by looking back at the past but by laying out a new path and contributing to the Made in Italy design system.
Curated by the philosopher, historian and art and design theorist Aldo Colonetti together with the architect and researcher Valentina Fisichella, the exhibition offers visitors an itinerary presented through synaesthetic environments that host objects, videos, works of art, products, documents and drawings.
The installation project by the architect Matteo Vercelloni, which gives numerous different dimensions and shapes to the exhibition, together with the multimedia and live performance by the Ex Anima collective, all enhance the visitor’s experience with different meanings and levels of interpretation; highlighting the cross pollination and interchange between industrial design and art, and the synergistic relationship between science and design and reformist design, the Caimi hallmark. As a matter of fact, since its origins the company has operated with coherence and method within a reformist design framework, reflecting in non-ideological or revolutionary terms on the great themes that characterize the contemporary nature of our world.
More than products and documents, the project is a series of ideas, illustrated not only in the exhibition, but also in a book and a podcast dedicated to the various themes and characters found throughout the brand’s history, including entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, artists and communicators.
Through the interventions of the curators and the central figures, and featuring all the characteristics of an essay, the book places the evolution of the brand and its family history, which has been carried on successfully and uninterruptedly by three generations, within the framework of seventy-five years of design culture and social life.
The editorial project intends to provide the reader with an idea of the complexity and above all the originality of Caimi’s working method. In order to do this, a series of specific points of view (P.O.V.s) have been inserted in parallel with each chapter, in the form of interviews or short reflections that offer a lateral and at the same time direct and intimate look at the company and its members.
As such, if taken all together the P.O.V.s constitute a section in their own right or rather a kind of diary that expands the reading options. Furthermore, quotations and cultural references provide further insights, which are useful for the reader to get their bearings in the vast conceptual landscape of this unique moment in Italian design.
A series of hitherto unpublished testimonies thus trace the narrative of an activity that began with the invention and production of simple but famous objects (the schiscetta or lunchbox, the Lombardy name for the hermetic container that allowed workers to safely carry their meals with them on their way to work), to the most intensely felt needs of today’s home and office life: protecting comfort, health and aesthetics together through the efficient and versatile absorption of acoustic and electromagnetic emissions.
An indispensable element of this history of consistency is the attention that has been paid to science and its applications. This led to the establishment of the Caimi OpenLab research centre, initially created for use by the company, but immediately made available to Universities, research institutes and Foundations which intend to use the available investigative instruments for investigating the contemporary reality of the world of acoustics.
The overall consistency of this long journey is best summed up in the formula that gives the title to the exhibition and the project: “Feeling good”. It is an invitation to consider the needs and conditions of users as a solid point of reference, whatever the product that the designer and company are considering. At the heart of the business are the ability to think and produce feasible projects that respond to real needs, the cross-pollination between industrial design and art, and the indispensable collaboration between science and design.
It is from the desire to analyze and research these crucial issues of life and products that the synergy between the ADI Design Museum and Caimi emerges, a reflection of the elective affinity that unites an experiential and research museum with one of the finest Made in Italy companies.
