Concept
Curated by Alessandro Colombo and Franco Origoni
From December 18 to February 2
One year after the donation of Mario Mastropietro’s library to ADI, consisting of over 300 volumes dedicated to Design, Exhibition Design, Museography, and Architecture, the exhibition “Displaying the Project: The Paths of a Publisher” pays tribute to Mario Mastropietro’s 50 years of professional activity.
In 1982, Mario Mastropietro founded his own publishing house. Edizioni Lybra Immagine focused on a very specific theme: the culture of design, exploring the entire process from the inception of an idea to its realization. During this historical moment, Mario Mastropietro foresaw a significant relationship between design and industry and published the publishing house’s first book: An Industry for Design. Research, Designers, and the Image of B&B Italia. This volume resulted from in-depth research into the vital core of design, the meeting point between designers and industry.
Mario Mastropietro also worked on numerous other editorial projects, including Displaying. Exhibition Design in Italy from the 1920s to the 1980s by Sergio Polano, which has been considered the “bible” of exhibition design in Italy since 1988, and Exporre, a quarterly magazine that, from 1989 to 2014, contributed to establishing cultural recognition and specific autonomy for exhibition design.
The exhibition narrates, in the first person, a journey articulated through the creation of editorial series, monographs, historical texts, and magazines, consistently distinguished by an innovative approach. Most importantly, it inaugurated entirely new fields of research, bringing to the forefront topics that had been neglected, such as exhibition design, capturing the attention of the public, professionals, and critics alike.
