About

CREATED IN ITALY is an exploration of Italian industry and its aim is to present a vivid picture of Italian expertise. The exhibition brings together numerous individual stories, in an attempt to outline the quality and characteristics of Italy’s multifarious production. Conspicuous among these national features are a stubborn search for perfection and a renowned spirit of invention, a constant urge to experiment and to force the limits of materials. Others include the pleasure derived from a product well made, the ongoing development of ways to improve people’s lives, and a delight in things of beauty, in lives fully lived. Plus a generous response to challenges, a flair for making products “to measure”, and a knack of adapting processes and technologies to that end.

The exhibition seeks to offer a broad picture of the Italian industrial system. Without claiming to be exhaustive, it is an introduction to the staggering variety of objects and constellations of artefacts that are the hallmarks of Italian industry, helping to describe the complexity of typically Italian manufacturing qualities.

The heterogeneity of Italy’s industry reflects the diversity of a natural landscape astonishingly unique in its wealth of differences (from the Alps to the sea, from plains and valleys to the Apennines, volcanoes and islands…). From this angle the exhibition is intended to illustrate the importance of such complexity and how it also reflects on the country’s industrial products. It is this multiplicity of objects and developments that surrounds Italy’s heritage of state-of-the-art craftsmanship, with an imprinting that persists and evolves within the industrial context.

This array of striking examples is the fruit of a richly creative diversity. Accompanied by in-depth scrutiny, interviews and a website, it indicates points of departure and aims to expand this first collection of stories. But its overriding purpose is to circulate and make more accessible the contents and cases displayed in our exploration of a naturally manifold, ever-changing reality.

Essays:
Designers, factories and the impossible
— Odo Fioravanti, Giulio Iacchetti

Does biodiversity exist for object?
— Francesca Picchi

Needs are wishes
— Enrico Morteo

Photo Max Rommel