The history of Italian enterprise in over 50 objects
“50+! The great industry game”
Itinerant exhibition narrating Italy in South Africa
An iconographic exhibition narrating Italian design, industry, architecture. ‘50+! The great industry game. Objects showcasing the history of Italian industry’, is the exhibition that will open on Tuesday April 20th 2017 at 18:30 at the Open Window Institute in Centurion, Pretoria.
The exhibition, created by Museimpresa and curated by Francesca Molteni, narrates the 50 and more objects that made the history of Italian enterprise through a panel installation that presents ideas, projects and stories of objects that became icons of the collective imagination (as for instance the Vespa, the Campari Soda bottle, the Barilla pasta box, or Olivetti’s Valentina). The objects have been selected from the collections and archives of the museums associated with Museimpresa with the collaboration of their curators. The exhibition, made up by 54 stories on 24 panels, a “Game of the goose” and the quiz “riddle me this”, is a time machine, a history through the objects dotted by inventions, intuitions, risks born from the talent of business leaders and factory poets, workshop visionaries, workforce passion and the silence while drawing in the office. The “Great Industry Game” narrates the “Made in Italy” that changed the way of life, the history, the economy and the lifestyle of the Italian society.
Manufacturing industry objects of an extraordinary symbolic significance: sacred and domestic, museum and household, realized by big designers or small artisans, have shaped the collective imagination of a whole Nation with swift, proud and unexpected technological innovation. With turbines, samples, on the road alembics and musical instruments, bottles, décor and logos, colourful fabrics and gasometers, engines, ceramics and slow-motion, calculators and pharmaceutical packaging, toys and helmets, history is paraded on an imaginary line, scanned by a combination of history, communication, design and innovation that made these objects icons.
The exhibition, organized in South Africa by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Pretoria in collaboration with the Open Window Institute, will be open to the public until May 9th 2017.