In the name of decorum and the unexpected

Cristina Morozzi was the curator in charge of creating the themes and cultural itineraries of Barocco&Neobarocco. With exceptional scenographies, he chose to involve the artists Giuseppe Leone, Davide Bramante, Graziano Villa and Giovanni Blanco, the stylists Loredana Roccasalva and Luigi Piccolo and, naturally, the local companies, staging through site-specific installations the continuous dialogue between history and contemporaneity in the name of decorum and, more generally, passion that humans nourish for ornamental signs.

Palazzo Cosentini, the Circolo di Conversazione, the former San Vincenzo Ferreri Church, the Cathedral museum, the Iblei gardens, the theater and the Donnafugata castle are the spaces that have hosted design products and works of art, fashion and photography. Special attention is also paid to the work of the students of the Brera Academy, the Abadir school of Catania and the ISIA of Florence.

Ornament is not a crime

During the four days of the Festival numerous talks traced lines of dialogue between the reality we live in and the historical memory of the area. Cristina Morozzi reminded the public that: "Ornament is not a crime", recovering a famous quote by Adolf Loos who on the contrary in Words in the Void, in full post-Secession, declared that: “the evolution of civilization is synonymous with the abolition of ornament in everyday objects”.

The critic and historian of design Silvana Annicchiarico instead got straight to the point, highlighting how the design of the last forty years has often gone beyond the legitimate boundaries of form (classical or modernist) to probe what 'is beyond the threshold of normality.

From Gaetano Pesce onwards, the project also serves to observe without judgement, to discover the dark sides, to amaze, disturb, talk to the individual and collective unconscious.

Design is not just rationalism, fortunately

Gilda Bojardi, director of Interni, sought the cumbersome presence of bizarreness and strangeness in the process of building the FuoriSalone system. As a protagonist of the birth of the Milanese event, he recalled how from the beginning it was precisely the attempt to insert breaking elements into the trade fair tradition, oddities that led to a new concept of an international event, which includes the city, territories, spaces and unconventional themes. Oddities, irregularities: definition which actually corresponds to the meaning of the word "baroque", in opposition to classicism and tradition.

Re-Evolution: without the unexpected the future cannot be built

He continued by evoking the advent of the most specific contemporary themes, which require us to think about the unexpected, about the reinvention of a reality that demands the ability to be amazed and not stand annihilated in the face of change. All this requires a good dose of Baroque and, above all, of Neobaroque, in a design work that designers and brands have been carrying out with conviction for decades, also and above all on the occasion of FuoriSalone.

A special mention on the theme of Interni's latestFuoriSalone: Re-Evolution. With high-profile authorial participations, as well as with the constant ingredient of courage and representative audacity, the numerous venues of Re-Evolution are the demonstration that the human creative capacity is alive, ready to invent the future and, above all, not at all alien to the idea of NeoBaroque.