Below are the first pictures of our set-design at the theatre Fenice in
Venice.
You will find other photos on DesignTaleStudio’s Flickr account.

The 53rd edition Biennale Internazionale d’Arte exhibition, this year entitled Making Worlds (Fare Mondi), to be held at the Gardens, at the Arsenale as well as other sites in Venice, will open to the public from June 7 to November 22, 2009, and will bring together in one exhibition more than 90 artists from around the world to showcase new works of art expressing a myriad of varied and diverse creative languages.

Refin will loan some of their DesignTale Studio works to the Fondazione Teatro La Fenice for the opening events as well as throughout the duration of the exhibition, and create the Fenice Design On Stage event. The celebrated rooms of the Gran Teatro la Fenice in Venece will host the exhibition of Pareti d’Autore by DesignTaleStudio created for the Design On Stage events of last years.  The works and set-design created by Michele De Lucchi, Sandra Bermudez, Karim Rashid, Elio Fiorucci and Romina Power will be exhibited and the guests will be given informative literature on DesignTaleStudio creative laboratory.

The inauguration of the event will be on Saturday, June 6, and the work will be exhibited in the theatre until September. This event represents a unique opportunity to once again underline the creative drive guiding DesignTaleStudio, which will be present at the Temple of International Art, the Biennale in Venice, with a strong co-marketing event.

For those who would like to attend the opening of the event, an invitation card (which should be compiled and sent to us) is attached.

In March, architects and designers reach fever pitch: the count-down to the Salone del Mobile exhibition in Milan starts, probably the most important event of our sector, world-wide. The anticipation is focused on the events and ephemeral settings of the Fuorisalone, in the Tortona district and of the Triennale. Last year, we created Design On Stage, a “design lounge” designed by Laura Villani opposite the Triennale, with the participation of many guests, such as Elio Fiorucci, Michele De Lucchi, Karim Rashid, Satyendra Pakhalé and Sandra Bermudez, each one the designer of a ceramic slab prototype for DTS.

And this year? We will be there again, don’t worry. Would you like some “teasers”? We will be once again in the square opposite the Triennale with a new setting by Laura Villani, with Claudio Porcarelli’s photographic set and an intriguing theme: creativity as transgression. Among the protagonists, we will have a legend of the Italian design and two international fashion-designers…..all of them famous “transgressors”.

Keep an eye on the blog, we will reveal more in the next few days…

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We would like to close the series of videos taken during The Grand Design Tour event with the presentation, by Laura Villani, of Sandra Bermudez slab, displayed at the Otto Gallery in Bologna. A work with a strong graphic element which uses crunched paper as a metaphor of the feminine work.

The main problem we came across while setting-up the “Meta Design” exhibition, was that of doing justice to the sheer beauty brought to the real world by DesignTaleSudio’s ceramics. The Pareti d’Autore where meant to be main cladding surface and works of art all at the same time, therefore, they had to, without compromise, “stand out” the best way possible.

The majority of the interior floors and wall-tiles we see on Second Life fall into two categories: the “ordinary” ones (flat surfaces, characterised by a feel of “comfortable” minimalism and with no basic aesthetic research) and the “grotesque” (textures which struggle to emulate real materials such as parquet, marble and stone with the use of photographic images). At the moment, perhaps the most interesting creations are those which use semi-transparent, opaque material, such as large, slightly reflective windows or plastic panels.

Ceramic has proven still difficult to use on Second Life, but with a bit of extra effort we believe we managed a better result than expected. In our opinion, the concept of the traditional ceramic tile as we know it, that is to say, a small glazed tile, is verging to grotesque, especially when the surface is reflective and the installation pattern conveys a very “grid-like” effect. The result is a kind of mural of identical repeated images where the real-life luminous qualities of the tile are reduced to whitish geometric shapes, mechanically repeated in an un-natural way. With larger sizes the same problem is slightly reduced though still visible: it is therefore better to use opaque products where graphics outshine the tactile and visual effects of the material.

Various slabs designed by famous personalities, such as those of Rashid, Fiorucci and Bermudez, actually did have these very characteristics and it was therefore relatively easy to display them effectively. But it was a different story for the totem designed by De Lucchi and, especially, the DesignTaleStudio’s Pareti d’Autore, whose light and material effects of the three-dimensional surface had to be reproduced. The solution we came up with was to use photographs of the products whose reflections had been partially reduced. In the case of De Lucchi’s work, the surface of the slabs was a single image, previously created with Photoshop by delaying the overall light of the original “amateurish” photo taken during the Design On Stage exhibition. But the Pareti d’Autore, especially the overly iridescent “unphotographable” ones like the Gold and Platinum, worked better if used as decoration rather than repeated backdrop. After being slightly retouched via computer and loaded on Second Life with the maximum resolution possible, the images from afar recaptured all the energy of the original designs while the close-up showed the fascination of their softness to the touch and light.

The final event of Design On Stage was scheduled for Sunday 22, when we played host to Sandra Bermudez, the conceptual and feminist artist of Columbian descent, who has always had a close association with the world of fashion in Italy.
Sandra told us what being a feminist means to her and explained the relationship between her art and fashion. The visual theme of her DesignTaleStudio project is crushed paper; her porcelain stoneware slabs are created in such a way to look like cascades, from “extremely crushed” to smooth, and have dashed pink grouts cutting across the work, symbolic of the feminine presence.

[tags]Sandra Bermudez, art, feminism, Design On Stage, blogmilano[/tags]

Just one week is missing until Design on Stage, one of the “coolest” events that you could ever visit during the Salone del Mobile exhibition in Milan! From April 18 to 23 at the Triennale in Milan the chance to meet your favourite designer in a surreal and glamourous setting, an Art Gallery built on the same Works exhibited: DesignTaleStudio’s Pareti d’Autore.

The guest list is complete and the calendar is set. The porcelain stoneware slabs that the guests have designed are now ready, and even if we can’t reveal anything about them, we are really hyped-up about the results. The works are signed by leading figures in the world of design , fashion and art such as Sandra Bermudez, Michele De Lucchi, Elio Fiorucci, Peter Halley, Romina Power, Karim Rashid. Different personalities from varying artistic backgrounds who, thanks to DesignTaleStudio, have found a “fil rouge”, a common artistic code. Being able to join different visions and methods of working has been exciting, always endeavoring to communicate the great creative potential of Pareti d’Autore. Each single artist, as you can well imagine, has given a personal interpretation of the project, perfectly summarizing his/her own personality on ceramic.

The event will be captured by Claudio Porcarelli, the famous photographer of the stars, who has been invited to take portraits of the guests (and not only). Therefore, the event will also be an exclusive photographic set, through which Porcarelli will give his personal view on the world of Design. During the event Claudio Porcarelli will create a “work in progress” in front of the audience, capturing the identity of the celebrities: the set will change every day creating a visual track of the guest stars present at the exhibition. As for the blog, we will tell you about Design on Stage adding live contents throughout the event and publishing interviews and images during the following weeks.

A real baptism of fire for DesignTaleStudio after the event held in September in Bologna: the Salone del Mobile exhibition in Milan, core of the design world for 6 days. Over the past few weeks we have been completely immersed in the organization of the event and to be honest, the stress level is high: yet seeing the evolution of Design On Stage day after day is really firing us up. The communication campaign was launched a few days ago and we already have one hundred registrations, mainly designers, students of architecture, many of them foreigners.

What are you expecting from Design On Stage and its guests? We invite you to leave your comments and of course… to register to the event if you haven’t done it yet, we are also waiting for you at the Triennale.