Good morning!
I’m typing this week’s newsletter from Milan, where I’ve been for the past few days for the annual Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair—my ninth since I started going, in 2013. (I should note here that, this year, for the first time ever, I skipped the Rho fairgrounds entirely and stuck only to the “Fuorisalone” events around the city.) Following last year’s intense, frenetic, and fun “Take It or Leave It” exhibition that The Slowdown collaborated on with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, this year I chose to go at a slower, more relaxed pace. My intent was for the week to be more about people than products, ideas than industry, and conversations than presentations.
An obvious highlight was the Tuesday book launch of Molteni Mondo: An Italian Design Story (Rizzoli) at the airplane hangar–scale Pirelli HangarBicocca art space, where Molteni&C put on a 300-plus-person mic drop of a dinner party set amid a towering permanent Anselm Kiefer installation. Edited by The Slowdown’s editorial studio, art-directed by the Zurich-based Beda Achermann, and featuring larger-than-life, Hollywood-style pictures by the Los Angeles–based artist and photographer Jeff Burton, it’s the first-ever book about Molteni&C in its 90-year history. Covering everything from the design company’s Giussano compound, to its many architect and designer collaborators, to its long-term partnership with the Gio Ponti Archives—and with texts by the Pritzker Prize–winning architects Jean Nouvel and Jacques Herzog, as well as writers such as Maria Cristina Didero, Francesca Picchi, and Janelle Zara—Molteni Mondo is no ordinary brand book, but rather something beautiful, filmic, and narrative-driven.
Another highlight of the week was the Miu Miu Literary Club—which was exquisitely branded by the firm 2x4, who also designed our logo—where on Wednesday the writer and curator Lou Stoppard interviewed the authors Jhumpa Lahiri (the guest on Ep. 69 of Time Sensitive), Sheila Heti, and Claudia Durastanti. The four discussed the 1950 novel Forbidden Notebook by the Cuban-Italian novelist and poet Alba de Céspedes, exchanging ideas about what it means to keep a diary, as well as themes of motherhood, translation, displacement, and rule-breaking. As Lahiri put it during the talk, “For many women, still, the message is: Listen, don’t speak. Take in, don’t talk back.” Ultimately a conversation about making art, it was a refreshingly radical and feminist event amidst a week that’s largely about selling coffee tables, sofas, and chairs (which are still to this day predominantly designed by men). “It’s important to push back against notions of who we are, what we should be, expectations,” Lahiri said, to powerful effect. (Coincidentally, on Thursday night, there was another notebook-related talk, moderated by Anima magazine editor Deyan Sudjic, about the new Lars Müller Publishers title Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook.)
As I made my way across Milan, I was particularly struck by how many former Time Sensitive guests kept popping up: Lahiri at the Miu Miu gathering; the interior designer Ilse Crawford (Ep. 107) and the fashion designer Paul Smith (Ep. 110) at the Triennale Design Museum; the designer Tom Dixon (Ep. 94) on a street corner in Brera; the fashion designer, creative director, and artist Samuel Ross (Ep. 92), with his massive industrial orange pipe installation for Kohler; and Google VP Ivy Ross (Ep. 11), at the tech company’s “Making Sense of Color” installation, which featured a meditative room exploring “chromosonic referencing,” in which light waves are converted to sound waves and vice versa (bringing to mind a Robert Irwin installation, it practically coaxed me to pause and reflect).
It was my friend the Madrid-based designer Sina Sohrab who pointed me in the direction of what became two of my favorite installations of the week: “Walking Sticks and Canes” at the Triennale, a joyfully simple show curated by Keiji Takeuchi and featuring 18 playfully conceived walking sticks, and “Legno Metallo Plastica,” a display at the closet-size Small Small gallery featuring rigorously designed, utilitarian-looking homeware objects—including a pepper grinder, bookends, a broom, and a citrus squeezer—by the British designer Michael Marriott.
During the week, I mentioned to at least two or three people that, though I previously edited a design magazine for half a decade—and will always have a passion for beautiful, well-made things, new and old—I now have only maybe two or three toes in the world of design, as opposed to both feet firmly planted in it. In reality, I appreciate having this “outsider” view. A literary talk in the middle of a design fair? Yes, please.
—Spencer
