Together with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Triennale presents a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Andrea Branzi: architect, designer, theorist, curator, lecturer and artist, a central figure in design culture between the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Through the gaze of Toyo Ito, the exhibition traverses the most significant nuclei of Branzi’s research, relating installations, drawings, objects, models, archival materials and exhibition environments. Thus, some of the founding themes of his thought – fragility, hybridization, planetary coexistence, the relationship between artifice and nature – emerge along with the biographical and intellectual dimensions of his work.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect that emerges clearly from the exhibition is precisely the totality of Branzi’s practice: a conception of the project that knows no watertight compartments and naturally crosses different disciplines, languages and scales. Toyo Ito conceives of the exhibition as “an uninterrupted flow”: a continuous, organic itinerary that returns the idea of a thought that is never definitively concluded. Indeed, Branzi’s works seem to belong to a “continuous present,” rather than to a precise historical time. Space is organized by flows, crossings and whirlpools, offering the public the experience of a living, mobile practice in constant transformation. The exhibition brings together more than four hundred works including environmental installations, models, drawings, objects of different sizes, videos and archival documents. It opens and closes with two self-portraits and includes a large site-specific installation dedicated to No-Stop City, a radical project that crystallized the idea of “territorial writing” and articulated a highly lucid critique of the contemporary metropolis. Around this nucleus develop Branzi’s numerous architectural, urban and landscape experiments, up to reflections on “theoretical metropolis.” Toward the end of the itinerary, more overtly anthropological nuclei emerge, such as Cosmic Hospitality, dedicated to the cohabitation of different species, and Hybrid Object, where design transcends its boundaries through practices of grafting and contamination. Also of particular interest is the section built around unpublished interviews conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, which emphasizes the value of transmission, teaching and dialogue as integral parts of Branzi’s practice.
What struck me the most and emerges powerfully is the way Branzi thinks about the object. In his work, design never coincides simply with the production of a form: the object counts for the thought it condenses, for the relationships it activates, for the world it lets you glimpse around it. It is a conception of design that is increasingly rare today, in which design acts as a critical device even before it is functional or commercial. The exhibition also makes clear the extraordinary fluidity with which Branzi traversed different fields: advertising, urban planning, architecture, product design, theory, staging, theater. He moved from one discipline to another with impressive naturalness, always maintaining the same lucid, ironic and radical gaze. A versatility hardly found today with the same freedom and depth.
This attitude appears to be profoundly linked to the cultural climate of those years: a particularly fertile period, open to the contamination of knowledge and traversed by a strong critical tension against consumer society and modernist institutions. Emblematic, in this sense, is the famous advertisement for Superstudio’s Safari sofa, displayed in the exhibition, which reads, “An imperial piece in the squalor of your domestic walls. A piece more beautiful than you. A beautiful piece you don’t deserve…” A fierce and highly intelligent irony, unthinkable in mainstream channels today, which shows how much the project could then become an instrument of cultural criticism as well as aesthetic production. Particularly interesting, too, in my opinion, is the overlap of seemingly distant disciplines in land design. In one of the projects commissioned by a municipality in Emilia, Branzi interweaves irrigation systems, Christian iconography and archaeology, addressing the landscape as a complex structure made up of memories and cultural signs as well as purely functional installations. The territory is thus read not only as a surface to be organized, but as a layered organism to be critically interpreted.
The exhibition thus reopens, without any nostalgia, an extremely concrete question: what are we still willing to recognize as design? Between the mid-1960s and the 1970s, Branzi is in his early thirties. He was formed in the climate of protest, the crisis of modernist certainties and the simultaneously seductive and violent expansion of consumer society. At that moment the project ceases to coincide peacefully with the idea of “good industrial product”: the house, the city, the landscape, the object itself become territories to be crossed critically. It was in this context that Archizoom, Superstudio and the experiences of Italian radical architecture were born: not marginal episodes, but the symptom of a season in which design could still be configured as a stance on the present.
The result is, on the whole, a remarkable exhibition. And it is so because the admiration it arouses stems not only from the quality of the exhibition design or the richness of the materials on display, but from the fact that it succeeds in making readable again something that seems increasingly rare today: the idea of a design that does not necessarily coincide with the production of objects, that transcends disciplines, and above all, that still retains the ability to formulate a critical look at the world.
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