Trame creative - Creative weaving
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Project Description
You will nerver look at pasta the same way after this. Have you ever thought about the geometries and colours of pasta shapes? We drew them on six tapestries created in jacquard knits. A journey through regional ingredients and people is here the basis of a necessary new narrative of the italian industrial paradigm.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
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Description of the project
Summary
The project aims to raise public awareness of a different tale of Italy, of how handcrafted skills are now the basis of a new industrial paradigm, well represented by the different actors that took part of the project. Different people, dialects and cultures are, in fact, the actors that make up this recipe of the highest quality and, like spaghetti, they intertwine for a tasteful story. The power of the Made in Italy food that the project means to celebrate is a tale of success in the quality-oriented industrial development model in which traditions and territories blend with innovation, research and culture.Ingredients of this recipe is a famous, recognized and recognizable product, pasta. Three designers drew pasta on six tapestries in jacquard knits. After a journey through regional ingredients and people, the team found inspiration and cooperation from classical shapes and from the tradition of three regions: Sardinia, Abruzzo and Tuscany. Using a personalised knit weaving technique, we manged to transform the graphic language into the most suitable textile language.Thus the relationship between production and the creative process becomes two-way, triggering interesting relationships of reciprocal influence and reciprocal contamination."Trame Creative" is the project conceived for the VI edition of the Week of Italian Cuisine in the World, shaped into two exhibitions at the Cultural Institutes sites of Warsaw and Zagreb. Visitors in the setting are invited to touch pasta and the soft tapestries. The product is a dish where all the ingredients are peculiar and contaminated at the same time, leading to a unique experience.
Key objectives for sustainability
The project’s idea shaped form the urgency to fill design projects with social, economic and cultural values, as a strong reply to the pandemic and humanitarian crisis. My team and I wanted to act as an engine for creating new ties, connections, opportunities and beauty. Sustainability lies in creating a design exhibition format able to talk about agri-food enhancement, textile industry’s technical innovation at the service of a cultural promotion of individual territories and regions.
Agri-food enhancement: pasta’s shape color and texture is a result of the productive process and represents both the historical biodiversity of a territory and its economic framework. The cosmopolitan shapes we all know are in this perspective the natural evolution of traditional pattern, easy to adapt to a large-scale production.
Individual territories’cultural promotion: each format tells of the landscape, climate, cultural and historical intersections, recounting "minor" places and places little known abroad, promoting new itineraries.
The innovation of the textile sector: our project unfolds on tapestries, a niche sector in textile industry, able to renovate its language and technological approach to design.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Using a jacquard knit weaving technique, it was essential to work on the best dithering algorithm to transform the graphic language of the individual projects dedicated to the individual pasta shapes into the most suitable textile language. After several tests for each of the drawings, the best degree of definition was defined with respect to the resolution lowering typical of the technology, working hard to refine the drawings with a pixel perfect approach. Thus the relationship between production and the creative process becomes two-way, triggering interesting relationships of reciprocal influence and reciprocal contamination. Despite this tech approach is still visible the knowledge of basic weaves of Tuscan weaving, as the famous tablecloths represented in the painting of "The Wedding at Cana" (1308-1311) by Duccio di Boninsegna.
Key objectives for inclusion
This is definitively a co-design project, a complete recipe where the main ingredients are:
- six tapestries made by Lanificio Leo, the oldest textile factory in Calabria (founded in 1873). Its impressive historical machine park, made up of machinery dated from 1890 to 1965, it is still the beaing heart of the production today as well as its own business museum, continuously integrated with latest generation equipment.
- six types of pasta (three well known in the world such as spaghetti, penne and fusilli; three related to the tradition of Sardinia (Su filindeu), Abruzzo (anellini) and Tuscany (pici ). They were represented and designed by Roberto Virdis, Giulia Ciuoli, AragoDesign, three experienced designers. All of them decided to work in their origin regions to enhance the traditional konw-how of their of belonging and sharing.
- a curator, Elena Santi, art director of Open Design Italia and co-design expert. She created disruptive exhibitions by reinterpreting the materials and symbols of Made in Italy in a contemporary key. As curatela she gained a great experience in international traveling exhibitions. She was selected as ambassador fot the Italian Design Day in 2018.
Results in relation to category
The impact shown in both exhibitions was demonstrated by the turnout of the public and the positive feedback from the Italian cultural institutes involved.
How Citizens benefit
Trame Creative's format allows to open and reveal important architectures and sites inserted in different European capitals and important dedicated places such as the Italian Cultural Institutes. In these spaces of dialogue and relationship is pasta the vehicle driving communication, as happens around a set table, in any kitchen anywhere in the world.
Moreover, pasta is a tale of knowledge, of gestures in everyday domestic life, evoking ancestral and historical cyclic rites. Each tapestry becomes the background of new tales involving the designer and the citizen.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
The project is innovative itself and we don't know any other traveling and co-designed exhibition format to compare with.
Learning transferred to other parties
Europe's identity is still to buid and this project can be adapted to every and each european country willing to promote and tell its uniqueness to others. We consider it as a real opportunity for companies, insitutional sites and other stakeholders to levarage agri-food sector as an opportunity for co-planning and co-design.
