Nanda Vigo at MAXXI

The seventh edition of the Alcantara MAXXI Project was inaugurated on Thursday 1st February.

Alcantara, founded in 1972, represents one of the excellences of Made in Italy. It is an innovative brand that offers a combination of sensoriality, aesthetics and functionality without comparison. It is a very versatile material, used in many fields such as fashion, accessories and interior design.

The format Progetto Alcantara – MAXXI this year is renewed, after six years of collective exhibitions by over thirty designers and numerous studios involved, the program with Studio Visit becomes monographic: every year a designer is asked to design a space to interior of the museum that interprets a work from the MAXXI permanent collection. The first exhibition, Arch / arcology, curated by Domitilla Dardi, sees Nanda Vigo as protagonist.

This space / installation Arch / arcology is a tribute to the idea of a great visionary architect: Paolo Soleri, the arcology, a term coined by himself by the fusion of the words “architecture” and “ecology”. An extremely popular concept in science fiction, which aims to be the solution to the problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation, by reducing the surface of the cities, thus developing upwards. The basic idea of the archeology is based on the critique of modern urbanization that requires excessive space on Earth. A practical example of this idea is found in Arcosanti, a city in the United States, Arizonato be precise, a prototype of arcology, an “experiment” city.

Chosen for its research and interior design capabilities, Nanda Vigo creates at MAXXI a space in which visitors can enter and move. It is a tribute to the visionary architect Paolo Soleri, whose works are kept in the MAXXI Architettura collection. He has created a space that allows visitors to enter some of the architect’s projects that have never been realized, a space where three-dimensional developments of some projects that Soleri had represented only on plan are exposed. All in alcantara!

The sculptures are displayed on the three walls of the room while in the center the designer has chosen to place Single Cantilever Bridge, a Soleri project from the 60s. As a background music, Vigo chose a selection of pieces by Franco Battiato.

The entire collection, after the exhibition, will become part of the MAXXI permanent collection.

Nanda Vigo writes in the introductory text to the exhibition: “As a girl, reading Flash Gordon, I dreamed of living in the city of the planet Mongo so suspended between the sky and the earth in antigravitation, and review, reread here the projects of architect Paolo Soleri, as those in the marvelous nine-meter strip, kept in the Archives, gave me a real pleasure of interest, first of all because they are projects only seen in plan, and never in elevation “.

The curator of the project ,Domitilla Dardi, says: “It was exciting to witness the critical reading that Nanda Vigo made of the work of Paolo Soleri. He showed us that an interpretation can use very different means from words and for this reason it is extremely effective. Through his three-dimensional and spatial project it is, indeed, possible to have access to the way in which a contemporary designer interprets the work of a great of the past. The Studio of Nanda Vigo gave us a Soleri all to be rediscovered and the meeting between their works generates a new effect of great power “.

Visitable until 25 February 2018!