‘Somebody told me that Martin Scorsese made drawings, and of course I got curious,’ says curator Melissa Harris about the inspiration behind her new show at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio, A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings. The exhibition features hundreds of storyboards and other preparatory materials–mood boards, annotated scripts, photos and the like– from some of the most celebrated names in cinema working from the late 1920s up to 2024.

Those names include Scorsese, whose drawings for Raging Bull are a highlight, as well as Ingmar Bergman, Agnès Varda, Hitchcock, Hayao Miyazaki, Sophia Coppola, Hitchcock, Spielberg and more. Harris, who has collaborated with Fondazione Prada on two previous exhibitions, wanted to make a show about storyboards because its a subject that is rarely discussed (‘it’s a curators dream to do something fresh!’) and because, as she says, ‘it’s a cool challenge — to do a show about a very human process that is meant to facilitate collaboration, communication.’

For many, storyboarding is an integral aspect of filmmaking. They are documents that help film teams manifest the narrative, troubleshoot complicated shots, determine the most effective angles for lighting and shooting and more. For Harris the process of collecting and choosing what material was included in the show was ‘about diversity of sensibilities and approaches. We wanted animation and to move through the 20th century into the present. It was like a two-year treasure hunt, without knowing what the treasure was.’

On the surface, many of the pieces displayed in the exhibit might not seem like treasure at all. While some works are technically impressive, like Disney Studios’ animations for Fantasia or Almodóvar’s comic book-like boards for his 2016 film Julieta, others look exactly like what they are– messy, hastily rendered notes; documents that are made for a specific, practical function. Rather than detract from the exhibit, though, it is exactly what makes it compelling. A Kind of Language is the rare kind of exhibition that celebrates the initial idea of a project, rather than its finished product.

For many directors, the storyboard is where they realise their vision of what the film will be before the other forces of filmmaking– the costume, set, DOP and other behind-the-scenes creatives; the location; the actors; the budget– shape that vision into something else, the final product we go to the theater to see. As Scorsese himself once said, ‘drawing the storyboards is my way of visualising the entire film before I shoot it. In a sense, drawing the film as I wish to see it.’ At A Kind of Language we see Fellini’s drawings for Amarcord, an example of how the director, who was a tireless draftsman, used his sketches to realise the details that characterised his eccentric characters. There’s the storyboards for Hitchcock’s Psycho that illustrate how forty-five seconds of the scene are shot from seventy-two different camera positions; as well as Sophia’s Coppola’s rough sketches of The Virgin Suicides sequences and a page of annotated script.

The presentation of these works is heightened by the unique set design by Andrea Faraguna of the Berlin-based architecture office Sub. Each storyboard is presented on a drafting desk-like table echoing how it might look to stumble upon the workstation of a storyboard artist or director and adding to the sense that you are looking at a work in progress.

Seen all together, the documents that make up A Kind of Language present a diverse and compelling showcase of the creative mind at work. As Harris says, ‘working on this show has given me a greater appreciation for the intense and often nuanced complexities of communicating and collaborating while making a film. I love that it is ultimately a very human and visual process, and it’s this sense of joining forces to realize a vision that I hope is part of the take-away for visitors to the show (and of course I hope they enjoy and appreciate what they experience as well!).'

Fondazione Prada’s 'Osservatorio, A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings' is on until 8 September 2025

fondazioneprada.org

‘Live fast, die young’ does tend to create a legend. Italian artist Pino Pascali exhibited for only four years before being killed in a motorbike crash, aged 32, in 1968. Yet today, Fondazione Prada in Milan has dedicated four of its extensive main show spaces to an exhibition honouring his work.

Born in Bari in 1935, Pascali graduated in stage design and sculpture at Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti in 1959. Miuccia Prada writes in the exhibition catalogue’s introduction of his ‘inexhaustible instinct to rethink’. The Fondazione show’s curator Mark Godfrey, an art historian formerly at Tate, says that Pascali ‘wanted to get away from the idea of a signature style, reinventing his art after each major public outing. He once compared himself to a snake shedding his skin.’ He did have a style though, albeit a serpentine one, which this generous exhibition lets speak for itself. Spread throughout the sensational Rem Koolhaas-designed complex, the first part recreates his solo shows, the second is an examination of his materials, the third a conversational exercise alongside works by his peers, and the fourth a sequence of his most extroverted installations set against XL portraits of the no less performative artist himself posing by each with comedic verve.

Pino Pascali at Fondazione Prada: a pioneer remembered

Walking through Pascali’s recreated solo shows side by side is superb. You encounter his exhibition-as-unified-installation technique that, while commonplace today, was Pascali’s innovation and, says Godfrey, ‘his most original contribution to contemporary art’. His first solo show was at Galleria La Tartaruga, in Rome in 1965: in this version, you meet idolised elements of Italian culture – the colosseum, columns, and the female body (maternalised and eroticised, here pregnant in puritanical white beside hyper-sexualised red lips) – mainly blanched out, wall-mounted scenographic almost-paintings of details from these theatrically focus-pulled icons. Fragments of ancient ruins and isolated female body parts become like logos. A little sad, but also light, thanks to the ironically naïve charm of Pascali’s prop-like renderings.

His second exhibition, at Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, in Torino in 1966, showed large-scale weapons crowded into a room, as disconcerting at the time of the Vietnam war as the experience of being dwarfed by 3m guns and missiles up close is in today’s bloodthirsty geopolitical context. One visitor at Fondazione Prada whispered to his girlfriend, ‘I don’t want to get too close’, offering a spontaneous authentic commentary that Pascali would no doubt have appreciated. A father, holding the hand of his little girl, walked out of the room the instant he saw its contents.

Back to 1966, when later that same year, at Rome’s Galleria L’Attico, the artist showed something entirely opposite in aesthetic, but united by its use of forms to communicate something about human violence. If the weapons had all the subtlety of heavy metal, this L’Attico show was – and is in its replication – more ‘kid glove, iron fist’. A series of mat-white painted animal parts, some dinosaur-like, their primitivism rendered minimalist by his white-out technique and abstracting dissection, greets you as sugary. It’s so simple and pretty, it prompts delight. The creatures’ simplified representation is part plaster workshop, part nursery book in appearance, and gives these lobotomised beings an adorable and tragic character. Where are their other body parts? Wall-mounted or on plinths, these animal works bring the hunter’s trophy and colonial collector’s cabinet of curiosities to mind.

Pascali’s presentation is full of pathos and narrative while nevertheless being visually very lean to the point of looking chic. The pieces are made by stretching canvas over wood, in a technique cribbed from model airplanes. One he titled La decapitazione della scultura, nodding to his interest in reconfiguring sculpture as a medium. He called these pieces his ‘fake’ or ‘feigned’ sculptures, and they have something more of stage props to them than the lineage and formalism that sculpture historically carried, especially in Italy.

Halfway through the ‘Animali’ exhibition, Pascali tried out a new trick he’d come up with – he de-installed the works and put new pieces in, creating a second half of the same show, amping up the theatricality that his objects already contained. Part two was a sculpture environment called The Sea, plus a giant black and white dolphin, which he later split in two and mounted either side of a wall so its body is disrupted, reinstalled at Fondazione Prada on a pillar. This piece is flamboyantly fun, with its violence intercepted by the visual impression that the creature is swimming through the wall – or is the wall slicing through the animal? It’s perfectly unclear.

From here, you step into a room containing a flat floor sculpture that drops the heart. Four concrete squares of pavement with removable central panels rest on a low plinth. Three of them have their central panels removed to reveal a turquoise puddle, grey gravel, and opaque black. Titled ‘trapdoors’ (botole), they remind you of the theatre of urban space and the environmental entombment that concrete enacts. Next door, Pascali suspended rope-like 3D hangings in wire wool, contrasting concrete’s rigid containment with their worming organic forms shaped into a net, bridge and creepers straight out of jungle movie set.

Upstairs in the materials section we meet oversized mushrooms and geometric shapes clad in more wire wool and retro fake fur in all its funky fabulosity. Giant rainbow caterpillars made of broom heads. Hay-bale geometry and ready-made impersonations of water and soil. It’s man-made meets nature. Industrial meets agricultural. Pre-digitally modern, conceptually tight, it’s Pascali’s own vision yet of its time, in intimate conversation with Arte Povera and Spatialism, as the vast room mixing his works with those of artists he exhibited alongside in group shows makes clear. Here Janis Kounellis’ blowtorch, metal and plexi Margherita di fuori rubs up alongside Alighiero Boetti’s aluminium and river rocks Panettone, set beside some Pascali. There’s also some amusing genius from Michelangelo Pistoletto and Piero Gilardi, and the relationships here enrich and contextualise the singular clarity of Pascali’s recreated solo shows.

One moment of peak 1960s Italianicity is portrayed by a black and white photo of a handsome, stocky, tousled Pascali leaning over a young woman (Michelle Coudray, long-term partner of Jannis Kounellis) wearing a Pucci mini dress as he looks into her eyes. Literally on the back foot, her bobbed-hair grazes the poultry feathers of his wall-mounted work Le penne d’Esopo at Venice Biennale, beside which his hand is resting territorially. He wears hippy leather sandals, a beatnik-y neckerchief, and a mod-ish silver chainmail belt, holding a cigarette that dates him further. Their body language tells you the picture is staged. Pascali, a consummate communicator, approached presenting his work with as much commitment as he did making it. He was clearly brilliant in the studio, but he was also gifted at framing the results in ways that captivated the public through his spirited style.

The Prada exhibition’s final section shows this to great effect as it places some of his strongest sculptures alongside black and white photographs of him posing in and around them, blown up to fill the walls, taken by his collaborators and friends. He did this so magazine editors would promote his shows as it made the images they received of his work stand out.

The most famous was taken by Claudio Abate, who shot Pascali upside down beneath his giant blue fake fur spider named Vedova blu, which he audaciously showed in a group show of mainly paintings. Like everything Pascali did, it was charismatic yet conceptual, ironic but sincere, evocative, accessible, low-tech, and quite brilliant. As Mark Godfrey and the Prada team’s poised and reverent tribute proves, Pascali’s all-in attitude sealed him a punchy place in art history’s memory.

‘Pino Pascali’ at the Fondazione Prada is on show until 23 September 2024

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In the Milan exhibition ‘Miranda July: New Society’ at Fondazione Prada, there is a short blond wig hung up on the wall, which July bought when she was a struggling artist working as a stripper for extra money in her twenties. There’s no mention of it, but it is displayed as one of the costumes from her performance Love Diamond. However, that object’s journey from a peep show in 1990s Portland, Oregon, to a major solo exhibition in Milan feels like a fitting microcosm of the show. 

That’s not just because ‘New Society’ charts 30 years of July’s career, from her early days in the West Coast punk scene and ending with her latest works, made as an acclaimed artist whose work spans performances, videos, installations, major motion pictures and novels. But also because July’s work has always explored the unpredictable, strange, joyous and heartbreaking turns life can take. 

In July’s world, a ride in an Uber one day evolves into I’m the President, Baby, a performance created by the artist and her one-time Uber driver, Oumarou Idrissa, that brings viewers into Idrissa’s home. There’s also the call from a random telemarketer in The Philippines that became Services, a collection of photographs made by July and telemarketer Jay Benedicto. A trip to the theatre, meanwhile, turns into an attempt, between artist and audience, to create a new society from scratch in the 2015 performance from which the Fondazione Prada show takes its name. 

All these works and more are on display in the new exhibition. Together, they create an entertaining and moving exploration of our insatiable desire to connect with something outside ourselves, and just how bad we are at doing it. 

Following the show’s opening, we sat down with July to discuss how it felt to revisit her earlier works, a new piece, F.A.M.I.L.Y (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You), made specifically for the show, and more. 

Miranda July interview

Wallpaper*: The new show is such an extensive archive of your work. There’s a poster from your first exhibition, made when you were 15, clothes from your early video performances and so much more. What compelled you to archive everything from such a young age? 

Miranda July: It's sort of two things. Initially, it was that my dad kept an archive and so as a little girl I just thought that's what people do and I just kept everything. 

Then around the time I made Love Diamond, my first performance, I stayed in New York at the NYU housing of someone who worked in The Fales archive, which is a very famous library archive. That’s when I realised that what's saved is what’s remembered, and what's remembered becomes history, and history shapes reality, our sense of what this Earth is.

I knew no one was going to ask some young punk performer to save things, but I had been doing that and knew that I should just keep doing it. Not to any particular end, other than that everyone should probably be keeping an archive so that we have records of what different kinds of lives were like.

I actually didn't think of including that stuff in the show until pretty late. It wasn't part of the original idea for the show. Mia [Locks, the curator] had signed on and we were talking about the different performances and at some point I said, ‘I have this whole room with everything from all of those performances.’ Then the show really shifted.  

W*: How did it feel to go back into those boxes and return to all these things you probably haven't looked at in a while?

MJ: You know how when you're going through old things, old pictures or letters, and it’s like you're stuck in molasses or something? You start reading and you just lose time. But we were on a tight schedule, so I couldn't do that. So I'd be trying to hand Mia relevant things as I went through the boxes. She just sat there while I kind of spun down into a letter to an early date of mine or something. But then there was also every receipt I ever got, every FedEx bill… so yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not in the show. 

W*: Did you feel like you learned something about yourself or your practice through that exercise?

MJ: I guess you always feel like you're not trying hard enough, or like, ‘I’ve really got to get it together, or make this thing better.’ You have these feelings and then you realise you've been trying at that most extreme level for a really long time now.  

The first time I walked through the show was right before the opening and I just walked through it rather quickly. When I got to the second floor to look at F.A.M.I.L.Y, I felt some relief. I felt like, ‘Well, this is a good direction for this person to have gone in. It seemed like it was a little bit more of an easier life [by the end than it was at the beginning]. I mean, granted, that person was also writing a novel that was really hard, but I like the progression of the show. It just generally feels good. I guess also that I'm not still 24. That’s just a relief. 

W*: You say ‘that person’; do you feel like you’re looking back at someone else when you view your previous works? 

MJ: Weirdly, I still have a lot of those [performances] memorised and the movements still feel very familiar. In Love Diamond, my choice to wear a swimsuit means that now, at twice the age I was then, I get to look fascinatedly at my former self, almost the way I look now at my [own] child's body with such awe. 

I can look at my younger self and see there's just a sweetness; my face is so much rounder. And yet, it's all just me. And I remember how it felt to perform that, and I also feel giddy because I know I'm going to perform again. 

W*: Speaking of the swimsuit, I noticed at the opening how many people stopped and looked at the clothes from your performances, which are displayed along the wall. I know you often dress up in your studio when you’re writing, and it seems that clothing feeds into your storytelling. 

MJ: I remember thinking this bathing suit had an amazing pattern. So, it was like a piece of art to me, and getting to wear it was part of the piece. I knew that it was a wonderful thing to get to look at, even apart from my body, as you say. 

I haven't really said this, but that first wig, that's now on the wall, I had because I was also a stripper. I worked at a peep show. And so, it was the same wig as ‘Penny’ who was in the peep show. So, I look at that wig and I'm a little like, ‘Oh god, I literally made my money in that way.’ I remember being that age and thinking, ‘Well, I can use it for this performance too’, because my hair was always punk and I wasn’t going to make any money [with it].

Then I remember I felt very proud when I bought a longer wig specifically for a show. It felt really professional to me that it wasn't my old stripper wig. 

W*: ‘New Society’ is the name of the performance you’ve done but why did you choose that work for the name of the exhibition?

MJ: I have to admit that the Prada Foundation suggested it early on. Which is so unlike me, I can't think of any other time when I've taken a suggestion. But we both thought it was perfect because both words are as broad as they can be, and yet they create a feeling. It’s so hopeful, but sad. [Maybe we need a] new society, or maybe the new society exists in each person, or maybe it is an idea that you hold in you. 

I can apply each piece in the show to that idea. It works as a touchstone, how it holds against all odds, holds this candle of hope, or curiosity, alongside a desperate feeling.

W*: Would you say that's the connection between all of the pieces in the show?

MJ: That and also certainly a different way of handling power. The giddiness and the excitement of having power and handing back and forth; and handing the vulnerability back and forth too. 

My girlfriend just watched New Society and she [said], ‘So was any of that ad-libbed? Or was it all memorised?’ And [said], ‘Oh, it's all memorised.’ Obviously the looseness is there. It could go out of control at any moment, from any person in the audience, or by the audience together. But nonetheless, every little moment is memorised, because that has to be true for the looseness to also be held.

W*: That tension between the controlled and the uncontrollable is one of the most exciting elements of the performances. I remember there was a point in New Society when you asked the audience if anyone played piano. And I thought, ‘What if no one played the piano? What would she do?’ Do you have a back-up plan for things like that? Or is that risk part of the piece?

MJ: I had to write it by rehearsing that every week with an audience, and adjusting it according to what happened. So, it's almost like making an app or some piece of technology where the user experience has to be developed. In fact, I had just made the app Somebody with Miu Miu, so it really did inform that process because it was iterative. You can make a version and then remake and remake it. 

The fact that I never did it in theatres that held more than 200 people meant that I always knew that the tickets would sell quickly, and that the people that would buy them would be my biggest fans. I also knew that because they were my fans, a certain percentage of them probably played piano. 

W*: I imagine that element of risk drives the work in some way though? 

MJ: One thing I have just realised is I'm so happy in my internal world, my fantasy world, which is also my writing world, that for me to do something in the ‘real world’ I need really high stakes. Otherwise, I'm not interested. So, I think that's part of it. I need to be a little scared or I'll just stay in and think, which is so fun.

W*: Your newest piece in the show, F.A.M.I.L.Y, seems to straddle your fantasy and performative worlds. It's situated in your personal world – in your studio where you write – but you have these almost ghost-like figures come in and perform alongside you. 

MJ: Every other piece in the show had its audience, whereas F.A.M.I.L.Y hasn’t yet. So I’m nervous about it and still working on it. I knew that this show would be between the time of me finishing my new novel and it coming out, and I think I have learned, barely, to try and make a process that's appropriate for the time and for who you are going to be in that moment. 

I knew that [the work I made for this show] needed to be something pleasurable, I needed to enjoy it. I'm willing to go through hell for a lot of these things, but that's not always a given. For this one, I just kept putting away ideas, taking turns towards things I could do myself and enjoy doing. I bought the biggest iPad you can get because I get to edit it with my fingers moving everything. So, it's quite sculptural putting everything together, using this app that is made for a baby to use. It’s not hard, but I’m really pushing it. 

W*: In the booklet that accompanies the show you say, ‘I often thought of yearning as one of my materials. Every new technology promises a new kind of intimacy that might somehow break through, make us feel not alone.’ I never really thought of technology that way. 

MJ: Part of it is that after a while you realise that these technologies come and go. Facebook still exists but we don’t use it as much. And now with Instagram, I was thinking, what specifically do we want from it? Why exactly is the visual part so important? And I realised, ‘Oh, it’s because we want to be looked at lovingly, so that we feel OK.’ But, of course, Instagram [as a business] has to do the opposite of that. In order to be a successful business, it had to just create more need for that rather than saving it.

So one idea behind F.A.M.I.L.Y, was that I’m just going to do that. I’m just going to consummate this. And then I'll come up with this new kind of sex and a new way to consummate it, because it's going to be mediated through technology, but we are going to love each other, have each other, somehow merge, somehow look at each other that lovingly. 

I mean it’s very clunky, and I left all the artefacts [of that effort] to kind of keep the humour of that, because that's not really possible, but I think that's partly why so many times people merge, or mirror, or go into each other. It's like we're each other's newborn babies or something. So, it's sexual, but very innocent. 

Miranda July, 'New Society' runs until 14 October 2024 at Fondazione Prada, Milan

fondazioneprada.org

Fondazione Prada’s latest exhibition, ‘Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries’ (until 22 February 2024) examines the cultural and artistic role of the decorative folding screen, an otherwise unstudied – and according to the show, occasionally maligned – object. ‘We don’t really know if they're functional or decorative,’ says curator Nicholas Cullinan. ‘Do we think of them more as painting or sculpture? Are they high? Are they low? They occupy this very liminal space.’

‘Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries’ at Fondazione Prada, Milan

The exhibition charts the evolution of standing screens, known as paraventi in Italian, from their roots in Asia to the object’s current role in contemporary art. The latter culminating in 18 original commissions, which includes new work by Anthea Hamilton, Betye Saar, Joan Jonas and Carrie Mae Weems.

Set over the Podium gallery’s two floors, each level follows its own curatorial logic. ’When you enter, you have an open labyrinth containing seven different themes that flow into one another,’ explains Cullinan of the exhibition design, entrusted to Tokyo-based Pritzker prize-winning firm SANAA. They laid out the ground floor in thematic groupings loosely delineated by fluttering curtains and curving plexiglass walls meant to reflect a folding screen’s shape. ‘Upstairs, it’s essentially a wide open field using only chronology as a coordinate,’ says Cullinan. Here, a procession of screens by the likes of Lina Bo Bardi, Jean Prouvé, Picasso, Yves Klein, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto are placed one after the other in the football-pitch-sized room.

The first section, titled ‘Readings, East and West’, charts the origins of folding screens in Asia. ‘Starting in China and then moving on to Japan before they began to be exported,’ Cullinan explains. ‘Often through the Portuguese who [brought] them back to Europe.’

As visitors walk through the Podium doors, they are greeted with a pair of Edo-era Japanese screens made of damask silk and lacquered wood, and an 18th-century Nanban folding screen depicting Portuguese trading ships in paper and gold leaf, which he says were known as 'black ships’ for their dark-painted hulls.

Also incorporated in the opening section are several pieces by contemporary Chinese artists, including Cao Fei’s ‘Screen Autobiography (Milan),’ which was commissioned for the exhibition and is composed of a collection of electronic screens programmed with the same digitally rendered wallpaper. ‘Looking at digital devices, one thing that flags up the idea of screens,’ Cullinan says of the piece. 'It’s very relevant to all of us now because our lives are mediated or even dominated by screens.’

Moving through the ground floor, sections are dedicated to topics such as ‘Public/Private,’ ‘Split Screens,’ and ‘The World of Interiors.’ The latter, according to Cullinan, is a reference to the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, who, by turning his flat in London into a total work of art in the 1970s explored how the decorative is often viewed pejoratively. 

‘We have this extraordinary folding screen by Francis Bacon, which alludes to the fact that in his early career he worked as a decorator,’ he says. ‘He designed carpets and folding screens and then tried to bury this aspect of his history once he achieved success as a painter. It’s the idea of the decorative almost being shameful.’

Indeed, more than anything, the exhibition provides an illuminating look into an object that hasn’t yet been given its due. ‘In many ways,’ says Cullinan. ‘It feels like a kind of secret history that hasn't been told.’

‘Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries’ is on view at Fondazione Prada until 22 February 2024

Largo Isarco, 2
20139 Milano 

fondazioneprada.org

The Grand Canal laps at the steps of Fondazione Prada’s 18th-century palazzo, leaving strata tidemarks charting the rising lagoon. This waterside entrance was once used not only to deliver dignitaries and guests who then climbed the grand staircase to the richly decorated Piano Nobile, but also materials and goods which were then stored in the somewhat less-grand ground floor spaces. ‘Everybody Talks About the Weather’, the venue’s new exhibition curated by Dieter Roelstraete and coinciding with the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, spreads across both floors, filling it with aesthetically beautiful if potentially cataclysmic images.

A ground-floor, low-ceilinged store is transformed through the blue hue of a sub-aqua video from Raqs Media Collective. Deep Breath (1999/2002) follows three divers in the Aegean Sea on a situationist quest to find distributed letters to spell out ‘the forgetting of air’ – a fragment of ancient Greek aphorism which references a study of Martin Heidegger, but perhaps now also speaks to our taking-for-granted of elemental forces and a collective lack of care for them. The work was filmed the summer before Covid, though the divers’ heavy breathing through back-strapped air tanks acts as a haunting premonition of the sounds of breathlessness and intubation which followed.

The ground floor stores of palazzos such as Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina are designed to survive Venice’s annual flooding, allowing high waters to pass under, while architecture and artworks of greater value are safe on higher floors. However, half of Venice’s intense high-water events since 1872 have occurred within the past three decades, so Raqs’ footage of divers floating through the palazzo could be read as another foretelling.

‘The scientific community is largely agreed that in 75 years Venice will exist no more, it will have been drowned … so this building will be lost,’ Roelstraete tells me. This risk of flooding can be read in his curation: the floodable ground floor predominantly presents video and quickly-demountable wall works – including Plastic Horizons (2014), a series in which Dan Peterman layers strips of recycled plastic as if documenting anthropogenic chronology – alongside ten high-resolution but relatively low-value printed reproductions of famous historical paintings.

At first, it seems odd for the curation to so heavily rely on these reproductions. The originals could obviously not be presented in such an at-risk, non-climate-controlled space, but their inclusion invites us to question what (and who) else is at such risk from environmental changes, or indeed to imagine what if culture we cherish now might only exist in the future through mechanical reproduction.

The function of the reproductions – including Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise – is not to add historic gravitas, but invite reconsideration of masterpieces through the lens of climate breakdown, reinterpreting them as documents of a changing ecosystem. ‘Venice is a very dramatic backdrop for this argument, because it's kind of a celebrity victim,’ Roelstraete suggests.

Information panels present contextual scientific data and research. Monet’s coalsmoke yellowness, blue morning light, and red rising sun are explained as a record of early industrial environmental impact, while diagrams illustrate the social and health impacts of the Little Ice Age Breugel painted through. The visitor can dive into this analysis as much or little as they wish, supported by a wide library of further reading.

Upstairs, the ornate portego is dominated by Vivian Suter canvases draped from a framework, playing against the colours and Renaissance clothing in surrounding frescoes. When Suter’s work overlooked the Acropolis at Documenta 14 her canvases flitted in open breezes, here their sway is more subtle as visitors walk by and Nick Raffel’s balsa wood Fan (2022) lightly circulates air from above.

Rooms on each side of the portego consider thematic climactic conditions including rain, clouds, and melting, using a variety of historic and contemporary works: Venetian Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s 2014 core samples of Lagoon mud provide more strata, utilising a process used by both environmental and extractive industries; an anonymous naïve 1709 painting captures Venetians comedically slipping across the frozen lagoon; a photograph by Hans Haacke documents the freezing, melting, and evaporation of snow on his studio roof; while diptychs from Chantal Peñalosa photograph a cloud from each side of the Mexico-US border as it innocently crosses the hard division. ‘The cloud is kind of like the archetypal figure here because it's the sublime object of detached aesthetic contemplation,’ Roelstraete suggests, before adding ‘but it can also be a portal of disaster.’

The dialectic between beauty and fear, as illustrated by the cloud, is present throughout ‘Everybody Talks About the Weather’, but might aestheticisation and beautifying unimaginably horrific outcomes soften fear, feeling, and potential action? ‘Yes, to a certain extent, but to a certain extent, aestheticising might also help mobilise,’ the curator says, before adding ‘though most of the people who will come see this are, of course, already aware.’

'Everybody Talks About the Weather', until 26 November 2023. fondazioneprada.org

Windowless walls, made of zigzagging aluminium panels; an impossibly sleek kitchen consisting of repeating geometric units, inspired by the work of Donald Judd; a custom ring-shaped conference table, with a slender marble top and tubular stainless steel supports that bend outwards to offer limited seating. These are some of the defining features of Elmgreen & Dragset’s latest fictional home, installed in Nord gallery of Milan’s Fondazione Prada. Over the years, inspired by the ways in which domestic spaces can express our identities and desires, the Berlin-based artists have created many detailed installations that evoke the lives of imaginary inhabitants – art collector Mr B, whose corpse lay adrift in the pool outside their Venice Pavilion; the elderly architect Norman Swann, disillusioned by professional failures and soon to be evicted from his grand apartment at the V&A; an unnamed family that has just emigrated from the UK back to Germany in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, taking up residence at the Mies van der Rohe-designed Haus Lange. In comparison, the fictional owner of the Fondazione Prada home is even more eccentric and elusive. His belongings suggest enormous wealth and power, but also considerable paranoia.

This point is driven home by a vitrine that houses four artworks: a pair of shrouded heads locked in a kiss, a miniature easel with a peephole that reveals an eye, an egg-shaped silver vessel intended as a resting place for a pair of smartphones (created for Wallpaper* Handmade X), all by Elmgreen & Dragset; plus a black leather-clad bust by Nancy Grossman with an open zipper around its facial features. Our protagonist has shut these symbols of desire behind glass, in the same way he has turned away from the real world and sealed himself in a hermetic bubble.  

And as the furniture reveals, this is no bubble of comfort. There’s a custom artificial leather bench with a side profile that resembles a cardiogram, and a tempered glass lounger by Konstantin Grcic with a backrest precariously supported by a gas piston. ‘It’s probably the most impossible chair ever designed, and therefore we love it,’ pronounces Michael Elmgreen, as we walk around the freshly installed home in late January. ‘It’s a comment on people arranging their domestic space into more of a showroom than a place for recreation and comfort. We’ve done this to the extreme here – everything is extremely uncomfortable, but it looks really good. Because if we continue to go down our current path in the way we organise our homes, this is what we’ll end up with very soon.’

This minimalist home is part of the artist duo’s new exhibition, ‘Useless Bodies?’, one of the most ambitious thematic investigations realised by the Fondazione Prada to date. As the title suggests, it ponders on the marginalisation of the body in the post-industrial age. Our homes are optimised to serve as social media backdrops, rather than to provide physical refuge; we are reduced to data points to feed the beast of Big Tech. We see this on a digital screen within the home that displays various statistics about our protagonist – his heart rate, stress levels, number of likes accumulated on social media; ‘all these things that have to do with our narcissistic perception of being perfect bodies’, says Elmgreen. 

These statistics overlay an image of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il Quatro Stato, 1901, one of the earliest paintings ever made of a worker’s strike and a clarion call against extractive capitalism. Its dignified portrayal of working-class protesters suggested an inexorable march towards a more equal society – a promise largely unfulfilled. Corroborating this sense of disappointed hope, an easel props up architectural plans for what appears to be a combination of an art museum, free port, and panopticon prison, a reminder that the trappings of civilisation are often enabled by prerogatives of the wealthy and the exploitation of the poor.

‘I don’t know if this home resembles a bomb shelter or a spaceship,’ remarks Dragset. ‘But for the rich, it will of course be one or the other in the future.’

Apart from a Unitree A1 robot dog (which is programmed to walk around the home and wiggle, offering visitors a dash of dark humour), there is no sign of activity within the 585 sq m home. As we approach the exit, we see the pièce de résistance – a grid of steel mortuary drawers, one of them left open with a pair of pale male feet jutting out, presumably belonging to our protagonist. It’s meant to be at once disconcerting and reassuring. ‘This is the only real democratic thing in our whole way of living,’ Elmgreen explains.

While the home in the Nord gallery presents a near-future vision of a one-percenter’s lair, another installation, occupying the upper level of the Rem Koolhaas-designed Podium building next door, shows the engine room of plutocracy. Aluminium foam walls and fluorescent strip lighting lend the space a corporate, clinical atmosphere, which inspired the artists to transform it into a contemporary office. On one end is a 2006 piece, It’s The Small Things in Life That Really Matter, Blah, Blah, Blah. Initially conceived for their seminal ‘Welfare Show’ at Serpentine Gallery, it comprises a number dispenser, an electronic number display, a row of seats and other accoutrements commonly found in a waiting area.

On the other end, the artists have crammed in a mammoth new work, Garden of Eden, 2021, comprising 35 office cubicles (each offering workspace for two) neatly arranged into seven rows. There are computers, desk chairs, as well as small personal items that evoke the lives of individual workers: here’s a kitschy gadget, there’s a postcard from a family holiday to Tenerife, reflecting the desire to shape one’s environment however soulless the corporate workspace may be. It calls to mind the artists’ 2010 installation The One & the Many, a four-storey housing block within the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe that offered brief glimpses of its tenants’ lives – here, grey Maharam fabric partitions have replaced prefabricated concrete, but the weight of conformity continues to loom heavy.

As with the Nord gallery, there are no inhabitants in sight. The office looks as if it has been hastily abandoned, calling to mind Covid-era lockdowns, but the artists in fact conceived Garden of Eden long before. It was intended as a comment on the throttling effects of capitalism, and the constant need to optimise space (workers are squeezed into tighter and tighter quarters, so employers can get more bang for their buck), though in light of recent events, it can also be read as a memorial to times past.

‘We can perhaps say, we won’t miss this office set-up, because it wasn’t optimal to work in that way,’ reflects Dragset. ‘But on the other hand, it’s a sad memorial because we’ve lost our togetherness, the social dimension of being in a workspace together.’

Proving his point, a readymade water cooler stands nearby, filled with water from Flint, Michigan, where ongoing lead contamination became a symbol of inequality and political failure. After years of clean-up, the city’s water was scientifically proven to be potable in 2019, but its notoriety lingers, so the artwork title Flint Water is enough to give us pause. It also raises the question of how the experience of the Covid pandemic may have lasting damage on our psyche, to an extent that we can never look at the gathering of our physical bodies in the same way again.

One floor down, the artists have gathered physical bodies nonetheless, only in the form of sculpture. Here, iconic works such as He (Silver), 2013 (a male version of the famous Little Mermaid statue on Copenhagen’s waterfront), and For today I am a child, 2016 (a boy gazing at a rifle that has been encased in a glass vitrine, a vision of a world beyond gun violence) intermingle with more recent pieces, many produced during the Covid pandemic. Notably, a boy on an umpire’s chair (Watching, 2021) highlights the ways in which we have been relegated to observers rather than participants in society, and a pair of young boys wearing VR goggles (This is How We Play Together, 2021) bemoans the toll of digital technologies. They are placed in dialogue with older sculptures, from Greco-Roman to Bertel Thorvaldsen and Luigi Secchi, that defy conventional representations of heroism and masculinity. The duo selected these pieces in response to Fondazione Prada’s inaugural show in 2015, which emphasised triumphant portrayals of idealised bodies within classical sculpture.

‘The more we looked, we saw that there are quite a lot of links between the Greco-Roman tradition and our sculptures, that even we ourselves weren’t aware of,’ says Elmgreen. ‘Classical and neoclassical sculpture is in fact rich in representations of normal citizens, more body types and more effeminate postures.’ To highlight the contemporary relevance of these representations, the artists have developed a system of cross-references, juxtaposing these pieces with their own work and positioning the sculptures in unusual ways – for instance, an athlete appears to be hiding within a metal frame rather than using it as a pedestal.

Positioning and recontextualising are integral to the practice of Elmgreen & Dragset, who once set up a Prada store in the middle of the desert (Prada Marfa, 2005, is a pilgrimage spot for art lovers and remains one of the artists’ best-known works). On the grounds of the Fondazione Prada, near the entrance to Restaurant Torre, they’ve installed The Outsiders, 2020, depicting two male art handlers made out of silicone, snuggled up against each other among packed artworks in the back of a Mercedes-Benz W123 wagon from the 1970s. Originally envisioned for Art Basel, it is a reminder of the unacknowledged and often deliberately hidden human labour behind the art world’s pristine façade.

The final part of the show takes up the Cisterna, a trio of spaces that contained enormous cisterns back when the Fondazione Prada had been a gin distillery. The artists have transformed these into a forsaken spa, with a locker room on one end and an abandoned pool on the other. In the former, some of the locker doors are left ajar, revealing objects that once again invite us to imagine the personalities and lifestyles of their owners. In one of them, a pair of briefs is suspended on a hook, underneath it is a pair of white flip-flops, neatly arranged as though on a shop floor; in another, an FFP2 mask and a pack of aspirin. A particularly messy locker reveals a small heap of rumpled clothing, a full ashtray, and a used espresso cup atop a torn packet of sugar. There’s also an empty locker with its interior entirely clad in 24-carat gold leaf, a reference to OMA’s gold cladding for the Haunted House at Fondazione Prada.

Further spa and changing room-related sculptures populate the space, including a massage bench where a life-size silicone figure of a naked man lies prone, covered only by a white towel over his hips. Despite its title, The Touch, 2011 does not include the figure of a masseur, giving the impression of eternal purgatory. Alongside, we see a pair of sinks connected with a twisting pipe, a pair of wooden doors linked with a security chain that would prohibit either from fully opening, and two pairs of rumpled jeans and some underwear that seem to have been recklessly discarded in a steamy rendezvous. Meanwhile, the empty pool, reminiscent of the artists’ installation at Whitechapel Gallery in 2018, is littered with debris and incongruously adorned with a bronze car seat, and a lacquered aluminium rock on a trampoline. 

The space in the middle is also the last one visitors see as they exit the exhibition, and it’s empty at ground level – we have to look up to discover the final artwork, What’s Left, 2021, showing a young man, clinging on to a wire with his right hand to prevent himself from falling, and clutching a balancing pole in another. With this piece, the artists want us to ponder, ‘should we really try to come up on that wire again and continue? Or should we just give up, loosen the grip and see if we will survive or die?’

Dragset adds that this is a commentary on our physical existence, as well as on political ideology. There’s a 1990s look to the young man’s attire, alluding to the optimism of the West following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the words ‘What’s Left’ on his T-shirt are the artists’ commentary on how capitalism has failed us. We have been disappointed, but are nonetheless unable to come up with a viable alternative. 

It’s a nerve-wracking note on which to end a disquieting exhibition. But don’t call the artists pessimistic. ‘It’s important to note that the show is titled “Useless Bodies?” with a question mark. Our answer, if any, would be no,’ Elmgreen concludes. ‘It’s an exhibition that we hope will encourage viewers to say, we need better spaces for our bodies, we need to put less pressure on our bodily appearances. And we need to be accepted as bodies and not only minds, to remind ourselves of the value of being physical beings.’ 

INFORMATION

A version of this article will appear in the May 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands and available to subscribers from 7 April. Subscribe today

Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘Useless Bodies?’, until 22 August, Fondazione Prada, Milan. fondazioneprada.org; elmgreen-dragset.com

‘Mr. Celant (whose name is pronounced jer-MAN-o che-LANT) was born in 1940 and is representative of a new kind of curator, one who functions as an impresario or guest-artists in one city after another, moving from place to place and from commission to commission.’ So explained John Russell’s article in The New York Times from 1988 announcing the appointment of Celant as Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. By that point, Celant was two decades into an extraordinarily industrious, energetic and peripatetic career; one that had indeed seen him acting as an ‘impresario… moving from place to place’.

But let’s begin with one place – Genoa, where both Celant was born and then, in 1967, when still only 27, his creation Arte Povera - one of the most innovative and influential international tendencies in post-war art. Following his parents’ wishes, and stifling his artistic leanings, Celant enrolled at engineering school, where he was taught by the brother of Palmiro Togliatti (the leader of the Italian Communist Party), who Celant remembered gave him ‘terrible grades’.  At the same time, and as an entrepreneurial taste of things to come, Celant recalled how ‘I organized the first Latin American and Pan-African festivals, and did all the PR myself.’ 

In 1961, the eminent art historian Eugenio Battisti taught at the University of Genoa, and Celant became one of his students. It was through Battisti’s seminars that Celant met figures such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and then began to write for Marcatré (the first interdisciplinary magazine in Italy) and the architectural journal Casabella.  As editor of the art columns for both publications, Celant travelled throughout Italy and met fellow critics, gallerists and, crucially, artists such as Lucio Fontana, but also a younger generation including Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini and Michelangelo Pistoletto, each of whom would become key artists affiliated with Arte Povera.

By the time of the now landmark founding exhibition ‘Arte Povera e Im Spazio’ at Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, in September 1967, Celant has emerged as one of Italy’s key critics, with his striking and strident formulation of Arte Povera as an art of ‘guerrilla warfare’ that rejected consumer society and reflected Italy’s struggle to adapt to the transition from a relatively impoverished, and predominantly agricultural country ravaged by the Second World War, to the rapid industrialisation propelled by the miracolo italiano in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

That Celant was able to unite and coordinate a disparate group of artists, spread across highly divergent Italian cities, into a cohesive tendency that would quickly achieve international prominence, is still remarkable. By 1968, Celant met Harald Szeemann, and began an exchange that would culminate with the presence of several of the Arte Povera artists in the landmark exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form the following year in 1969 (which Celant would go on to painstakingly and compellingly restage at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2013). Celant seemed to have had a desire to make Italian art international once again from the outset – a life’s mission that never left him and which he was extraordinarily successful at. 

By the 1970s, Celant was in demand internationally and began to curate increasingly adventurous and wide-ranging exhibitions – whether on Piero Manzoni; an exhibition of artists’ books and records; on Futurism or Art as Opera, which included Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Phillip Glass.

As the 1980s began, with the art market now very much in the grip of painting typified by the Transavanguardia group, Celant began to make a concerted effort to revive Arte Povera with a series of international exhibitions. At the same time, he curated ambitious historical surveys, such as Identité Italienne: L’art en Italie depuis 1959 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1981, or later on the interdisciplinary exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1994, which notably and daringly including Pucci dresses and paparazzi photographs alongside the ‘fine arts’ and design.

From 1995 to 2014 Celant was Artistic Director and in 2015 became Scientific Superintendent of the Fondazione Prada in both Milan and Venice, where he curated more than 40 memorable exhibitions, of which, sadly but fittingly, the last turned out to be a beautiful survey devoted to Kounellis in Venice last year. He had many more ideas and projects still to realise: artists loved him, colleagues respected and admired him, we are all the poorer without him.

As Italy’s recent general elections on Sunday 4 March solidified the growing presence of far right and anti-establishment parties in Italian politics, it seems an apt coincidence that a current exhibition at Fondazione Prada explores the role of artistic and cultural production during the rise and fall of the country’s fascist regime. The vast show, ‘Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943’ – among the largest that the institution has ever held – identifies the environmental, temporal, social and political contexts that contributed to Italian art during this period.

Curated by Germano Celant and designed by New York-based 2x4, the Milan exhibition centres on the partial reconstruction of 20 public and private exhibitions held both in Italy and abroad. Private rooms and exhibition halls featuring over 100 artists — Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi alongside their respective movements futurism, Valori Plastici (‘plastic values’), Novecento Italiano, among others — are rebuilt within Fondazione Prada’s sprawling galleries.

Paintings, sculptures, architectural drawings, tapestries and furniture are placed in their original arrangements, while ghostly apparitions printed in greyscale appearin lieu of pieces either destroyed or unobtainable. Collected photographs, letters, exhibition catalogues and newspaper clippings are shown in tandem, illuminating the fascist government’s role in supporting and surveilling the arts in the guise of syndicated exhibitions and prizes.

Opening in 1918 at the close of the First World War, the exhibition’s first reconstruction is the private home of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the futurist movement, whose sound-poem Zang Tumb Tumb inspires the show’s onomatopoetic title. Marinetti’s writing glorified the violence of war, what he called ‘the dreamt-of metallisation of the human body’, and spurred on Mussolini’s cause in the form of a cultural counterpoint. The walls are hung with fawning portraits of Marinetti by Růžena Zátková and Fortunato Depero in the brashly colourful style that came to define the movement.

From there, the exhibition travels through time. Moving from the 1921 German exhibition ‘Das Junge Italien’ (‘The Young Italian’), featuring a wall of Morandi’s still lifes, to Adolfo Wildt’s room at the 13th Venice Biennale in 1922. The ‘Mostra del Novecento Italiano’, organised by cultural critic — and mistress of Mussolini — Margherita Sarfatti, delves into the cry for a ‘return to order’ in Italian art that endeavoured to erase the avant-garde exploration of the early 20th century. The exhibition, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1923, showcased work by Mario Sironi, Carlo Carrà, Arturo Martini, and more.

Further along, Mussolini’s propaganda machine reaches its zenith in the cathedral-like Deposito, which hosts imagery from the ‘Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’, held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 1932-1934. White panels as tall as houses are projected with life-size images in black and white from the event, which four million Italians made their way to the capital to see.

What begins with the futurist movement’s avowed glorification of the act of war finds its logical artistic conclusion in Corrado Cagli’s simple, excruciating line drawings. Cagli, an Italian artist of Jewish descent, became a US citizen during the war in order to join the military, returning to Europe as an American solider. Sketched in oil, the drawings illustrate the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, which Cagli helped liberate in 1945. A chilling but necessary reminder of the ultimate cost of a nation’s descent into the grip of fascism.

INFORMATION

‘Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943’ is on view until 25 June. For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

ADDRESS

Fondazione Prada
Largo Isarco 2
20139 Milan

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

When the Fondazione Prada opened its doors in Milan to critical acclaim in 2015, the fashion, art and architecture worlds found a natural home in the OMA-designed complex. The site, a former distillery dating from 1910, has been widely covered and lovingly visited since, but behind the scenes, further works have been quietly underway. Now, the foundation and its architects have just announced the completion of the complex’s next phase – its imposing tower. 

Fittingly named ‘Torre’, this new element brings height to the campus, which is composed of seven structures in a calculated mix of looks and sizes. The completed design, headed by Rem Koolhaas, with Chris van Duijn and Federico Pompignoli, also marks the completion of the Milan venue. 

A soaring 60m of white concrete, the tower unfolds across a total surface of approximately 2.000 sq m and nine levels. Six of these are exhibition spaces, with a restaurant, a panoramic terrace with a rooftop bar, and further visitor facilities occupying the remaining floors. 

Each floor is designed to host specific environmental conditions, according to the type of art displayed within. The height varies accordingly too. Glass opening are cut out of the concrete form, making the most of the Italian sun. The irregular shape allows for the variations in sizes and needs, cantilevering gracefully over the public spaces.

‘Torre is the final section of a collection of different exhibition conditions that together define Fondazione Prada’, says Koolhaas, going on to focus on the tower’s own, varied exhibition spaces. ‘Together these variations produce a radical diversity within a simple volume – so that the interaction between the spaces and specific events or works of art offer an endless variety of conditions…’ One thing, points out Koolhaas, brings it all together. ‘The staircase is the one element unifying all irregularities – its complexity lifts it beyond the typical pragmatic element, the staircase has become a highly charged architectural element.’

The Torre is scheduled to officially open its doors to the public on the 20th April 2018.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the OMA website

‘Have you seen the film Rumble Fish?,’ asks Carsten Höller. It’s the morning before the opening of the Stockholm-based artist’s new show in Miami: a three day pop-up club in collaboration with Prada that marks the opening of the Milanese brand’s new store in the city’s Design District, and which also happily coincides with Art Basel Miami Beach. ‘In that film, there are these little fishes. They are in colour, everything else in black and white. I saw it 20 years ago and thought that’s a great idea.’

Stationed at a former ice factory in Miami’s Wynwood district, the Double Club is an immersive artwork that doubles as a nightclub - a party divided into two parts. Upon entering, guests are given two choices: go inside or outside. The outside space features a Caribbean-style beach bar and stage space, framed by neon lights that wash the space in every colour of the rainbow. Here, on the opening night, revellers danced to live performances from Wyclef Jean, and Cuban bands.

The inside space has been painstakingly desaturated – ‘apart from the stupid exit signs’ laments Höller. Monochromatic patterns cover the walls and guests dance to techno music on multi-tiered dance floor among strobe lights, lasers and generous amounts of atmospheric dry ice.

‘It really works,’ attests Höller, ‘If you have been a little bit in the outside space and then go into the inside space it’s like cutting your brain in two in some ways. You feel like a Rumble Fish.’

The installation, which was just two months in the making, borrows its name from Höller’s previous show in London in 2008, also in collaboration in with Prada. Staged over the course of eight months, the original Double Club was a bar, restaurant and nightclub that explored the dialogue between Congolese and Western contemporary music, lifestyle, arts and design – an idea that Höller pitched to Miuccia Prada off the cuff, not expecting her to agree. It opened after a year of design and planning, but to Höller’s dismay was deathly quiet after its launch.

‘It was at the point when the financial crisis had just hit and the weather was lousy, and so nobody came. We thought that Prada and maybe my name might be enough to bring people, but no. It was empty for six weeks roughly, and then suddenly on 2 January 2009 – it was just full. And from then on it was really the place to be. It was crazy. But that’s London for you; once it’s on the radar, people will embrace it.’

The three-day Miami edition of the Double Club however, did not suffer from this problem. Queues stretched around the block on its opening night this week. ‘This is a bit confusing in the sense that we are using the same name again but it’s totally different,’ explains Höller of the three-day event. ‘Each work influences the next but it’s kind of unconscious. Sometimes you have to push yourself and get away from what you’ve done before.’

‘I think many artists fell into this trap – you’re doing all these experimental things and trying things out, and then all of a sudden some of these things get public attention, so you latch onto it and continue at it for the rest of your life,’ he continues. ‘I don't want to do this. That’s why we intentionally used this name again when it’s not necessarily the same thing, it means I can make more Double Clubs in the future.’

Earlier this year, Höller’s exhibition at the the new Renzo Piano-designed Centro Botín arts centre in Santander, Spain, also explored the theme of duality, offering its guests two pathways through a Y-shaped space. Höller, a former scientist, views these works as human experiments, likening the visitor experience at the Double Club to isomers – molecules that are made up of the same formula but with different chemical structures. As guests choose their path through the same space they each have different experiences.

‘Many of my works are Double Clubs of sorts if you think about it – two different halves that awkwardly don’t fit together,’ he ponders. ‘I like this idea of tracing a path; two different possibilities, you can go right or left, it divides in two, and then again, and again to infinity. It’s a simple mathematical concept.’

Yet its not the results of the experiment that interest Höller. He won‘t be sitting in the space taking notes or counting numbers. Instead he wants to offer his art as a social, joyful experience; in this case a piece that can be enjoyed by everyone, from nightclubbers to art aficionados.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

Francesco Vezzoli — the Italian artist known for his fascination with pop culture — is bringing back the 70s. Opening at the Fondazione Prada this week, Vezzoli’s exhibition delves deep into the archives of Italian broadcasting company Rai, dealing with television’s relationship with art, politics and entertainment.
 
In a fantastically psychedelic set (designed by M/M Paris, with whom Vezzoli has collaborated throughout the show) that recreates the vibe of a TV studio, Vezzoli’s consistent focus is women’s role on the small screen, and the way television served both the emancipation and exploitation of Italian women. The 1970s brought the TV diva: the ultimate Italian sex idol. Vezzoli explores this irresistible but problematic allure through the female hosts of TV shows such as Stryx and C’era Due Volte, alongside works by women artists of the same era, that disrupt this image, including Lisetta Carmi’s groundbreaking series, I Trasvestiti, which comprises intimate shots of transvestites taken in Genova, still radical even in the sexual context of Italy today.

The danger and pleasure in voyeurism is cleverly explored by other Italian women artists elsewhere. Giosetta Fioroni’s peep show, La Spia Ottica, is reconfigured from its 1968 iteration. Visitors can peer into a bedroom set where a female performer goes about her routine inside (the performance will be continuous throughout the exhibition’s run).

This flows neatly into a more direct confrontation of gender issues in the 1970s. A sumptuous reconstruction of a 70s nightclub — plush red velvet curtains, carpet, and furnishings — is the setting for large-scale projections of feminist footage from Rai’s newsreels. The TV announcements of referendums that resulted in the legalisation of divorce and abortion, in 70 and 78 respectively, are particularly poignant in the history of the Catholic country. Sicofoil works by feminist artist Carla Accardi are also presented as part of the set-up, uniting art and action.

It’s a fight that perhaps many young Italians have forgotten now. The urgency continues upstairs in the most dense, difficult part of the exhibition, with video materials of news from Italy’s Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead) a time of heightened political tension. Does mass media communicate information or incite fear? The question seems to hang in the darkness of this more sombre section of the exhibition.

From fun and factual to cerebral and political, each space in this ambitious show has its own distinct atmosphere, and walking around it is like a flicking through channels. ‘I wanted to set a path that was risky and dense — one as difficult as the subject requires — but also entertaining and surreal,’ Vezzoli says.

It certainly is dense. It might take the average visitor a few trips to view all the materials here, but Vezzoli has handled the archives attentively, with a healthy dose of nostalgia and fondness for the lost traditions of TV. His personal paean comes in a new video work, screened in the foundation’s cinema, an edit of footage that influenced him through his childhood, (spent watching TV with his grandmother, to the dismay of his intellectual parents).

As well as reflecting on the way television documented and contributed to social change, shifts in Italian identity, art, design and culture, Vezzoli wants to inspire with possibilities of television as both a medium and media now. ‘Viewed with a contemporary eye, Italian television in the 1970s clearly demonstrates its anarchic, revolutionary character.’ It is this spirit that Vezzoli hopes to revive. Until that happens, the Fondazione Prada are running all-nighter marathons of the TV programmes that defined of the 1970s, from avant-garde series to variety shows and documentaries.

INFORMATION

‘TV70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai’ is on view until 24 September. For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

ADDRESS

Fondazione Prada
Largo Isarco 2
20139 Milan

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

For the location of its first fully fledged Resort show, Prada chose Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the world’s first shopping arcades. Conceived by Giuseppe Mengoni as an intersection of two pedestrian streets – complete with elaborate inlaid mosaic floors beneath a soaring iron and glass dome – it opened in 1867 and became a showcase for the city’s burgeoning luxury goods sector; Mario Prada opened his first store in the arcade in 1913 to sell the family’s lavishly-tooled leather travelling cases.

Prada, which expanded the original store some years ago, recently took over the entire quadrant opposite, opening a men’s store and more recently a third Milanese outpost of the historic passticceria and caffé Marchesi, a fine fixture of the nearby Magenta neighbourhood since 1824. It was here at Marchesi that around 100 guests, jetted in from across the globe, sat down to a special lunch, which begun with a classic risotto Milanese and ended up with fancy pastries filled with chantilly cream.

The show itself was held upstairs in the Osservatorio – the Prada Foundation’s new exhibition space dedicated to photography and visual languages – extending across the fifth and sixth floors, high above the venue’s central octagon. Here AMO made a very simple intervention: undulating screens with distorted images of the galleria itself and details of the collection in pastel colours on the one side; and views to the iron dome on the other. The latter was left largely unobstructed aside from reflective and translucent columns in the same dusty pink as the satin-covered benches.

Models walked to Johann Strauss II's The Beautiful Blue Danube, coincidentally composed in the same year as the galleria was completed, mixed with Malcolm McLaren and The Bootzilla Orchestra’s Waltz Darling from 1989. A Prada collection typically combines complex references – and this was very much the case here. Liberty-style prints, popular around the time of the opening of the galleria were actually a revisitation of Prada’s own trembled blossom project from 2007 and 2008 (with Michael Rock and Sung Joong Kim of 2x4 and LA-based artist James Jean), the original fairies updated with bunny rabbits across tops, dresses and some very strong bags.

There were art deco patterns on fully fashioned knee-high socks and flapper dresses, pleats on bodices and yokes, which may have originated around 1900 yet fashioned into pretty pastel dresses just right for now. This being Prada, all that pretty femininity was topped off with graphic strips of industrial velcro, which the brand first made popular back in the late nineties.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Prada website

Critic and curator Francesco Zanot has organised an exhibition exploring photography as the new diary. ‘Give Me Yesterday’ includes 14 artists born between 1976 and 1993, whose practices document the peaks and troughs of the personal, alongside names names familiar in the art world and popular on Instagram – Ryan McGinley, Melanie Bonajo, Leigh Ledare, Vendula Knopova and Maurice van Es to name a few.

There are also students and unknowns: this is the first exhibition for Greg Reynolds, a former youth minister who photographed Christian summer camps in the 1970s and is the oldest photographer in the show. ‘I wanted to mix artists who had very different experiences,’ says Zanot. Each artist represents a different way of working with diaristic photography, but with a consistently intimate atmosphere. ‘The images bring you closer to the people who took them, to their friends, their families, themselves,’ adds the curator.

‘Give Me Yesterday’ takes us through staged, performative photographs – such as Izumi Miyazaki’s surreal self-portraits – to more traditional and candid compositions, such as Antonio Rovaldi’s breathtaking barren landscapes. Others, such as Lebohang Kganye, compiles a diary of her present self through old family album photographs. ‘Previously, diary was truth, but now, that would be impossible - we are so used to photography, through social networks, that now we have to manipulate – to stage – to say something true.’

The exhibition inaugurates Fondazione Prada’s new space, a recently restored observatory on the fifth and sixth floors in Milan’s historic Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II shopping arcade. The space boasts a sweeping, 30m window giving a vast panorama of the city below. ‘Most people living here in Milan haven’t seen a space like this,’ Zanot says. ‘We did not alter the space at all, so visitors can view the exhibition and the space at the same time.’

Making use of this unusual space, Zanot has installed the photographs as a mural, the works hung side by side: ‘It's quite intimate, it’s like walking into a kid’s bedroom, it gives the feeling of invading a private space.’ The arrangement brings the photographers into proximity, creating a liquid narrative between the artists and their works.

INFORMATION

‘Give Me Yesterday’ is on view until 12 March. For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

ADDRESS

Milan Osservatorio
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
Piazza del Duomo
20121 Milan

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Some of the largest architecture projects in the world are taking shape in a ground-floor atelier tucked away in London’s King’s Cross. Thomas Heatherwick set up his studio in 1994 after studying at Manchester Polytechnic and the RCA, and over the years he gradually scaled up its output, creating everything from furniture and installations through to buses, bridges, art museums and whole city blocks. Heatherwick now works alongside around 200 designers, 130 of whom have architectural training. The studio output is focused on big buildings. These include one of the largest mixed-use projects in China, a key component of a vast US private development, a California office for a tech colossus, and a new bridge for London, all of which are at various stages of planning and construction.

Despite this mega-structural ambition, every Heatherwick project can be infinitely zoomed into, right down to the smallest design component. This combination of scale and detail comes out of an absolute commitment to process, something that becomes evident the minute you sit down with Heatherwick to talk about his work... Read the interview in full here

In 20 remarkable years we have come across, written about, examined and exhumed a lot of remarkable people. On the following pages are 20 of them. This, though, is not a simple ranking of power and influence. These are stories that resonate, with which we find common purpose and cause.

Here are people who have sometimes stuck bloody-mindedly to a course, sometimes pivoted, re-examined and pushed in new directions, who have defied expectations and even open derision. They have shown courage under fire and grace under pressure.

They have transformed – from girl group popette to one of the fashion industry's smartest operators, for instance – and, over the last 20 years, have had a transformative influence in their field. Here are architects who build with a sense of the immaterial, artists who want to talk to everyone, experimentalists and food engineers, fashion designers who defy fashion and bob and weave like prize fighters, tech titans who have changed the way we do almost everything. One reinvented the hotel industry, another presents it with an existential threat. There is also a man who wants to save the world – or take us all to Mars if that doesn't work out. Either way, we'll be along for the ride.

Victoria Beckham’s transformation from pop celebrity and tabloid icon to the force behind a covetable fashion line is an extraordinary one. Indeed, when the Spice Girls burst onto the cultural landscape in 1996, it would have seemed unlikely that 20 years later she would be presiding over a label now fêted for its sleek, restrained lines.

But to hear Victoria Beckham tell it, she didn’t have ‘any grand expectations’ when making the transition from music to fashion. ‘I was just focused on creating clothes that I felt proud of and passionate about,’ says Beckham of launching her eponymous line in 2008. ‘The fact that the brand has since taken off in the way it has has been very humbling.’

Now, the label boasts its own handsome flagship store on London’s Dover Street, counts Net-A-Porter, Liberty and Barneys among its many stockists, and recorded a turnover of £34m in 2014.

But the signals that Beckham had an affinity for design were there at the start. She was the stylish Spice Girl who stood out amid her flashier bandmates. As her and her husband David’s fame grew, they embraced their roles as fashion plates with a mutual fondness for Gucci and Versace... Read the interview in full here

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve...

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve.

Hard but not impossible. ‘Far from being mutually exclusive, technology and craft are not at odds,’ he says. Apple knows this like no other, and that’s largely down to Ive’s status as a titan of exceptional user design. ‘Much like beauty and utility,’ he says, ‘[technology and craft are] all the more powerful in combination.’ Ive and Apple are another such supercharged blend

Most people steal things from hotels. Few try to steal an entire hotel. But that’s what happened to Ian Schrager. Just weeks after he opened the Edition in Waikiki, the owner of the building turned up in the middle of the night, changed the locks on the front doors and told the staff they worked for him now, not Schrager’s company. The episode neatly, if rather dramatically, sums up the man who has transformed hotels.

Over the past 30 years, Schrager has reinvented hotels and then reinvented them some more, and each time he has done so, his rivals, big and small, have stolen his ideas wholesale. At Morgans, the Royalton, the Paramount and the Hudson in New York and, along the way, the Delano in Miami, the Clift in San Francisco, the Mondrian in LA, and St Martin’s Lane and the Sanderson in London, he created the boutique hotel. It got the name not because it was small, but because it was curated with a strong attitude and aesthetic, like a fashion boutique.

The key ingredients are the lobby scene, the go-to bar, the must-book restaurant for guests and locals alike, the signature scents, the hot staff with clothes more expensive than the guests’, the cool nightclub, the sense of an urban resort, the CD collection and the baffling taps in the bathrooms. There’s scarcely a hotel on the planet whose design or service has not borrowed some or all of these elements. ‘They pickpocket my ideas,’ Schrager says. ‘I still get annoyed by it, especially when I see things that we laboured and agonised over that have now become standard. The bed with the low headboard with the light behind, it’s everywhere...’ Read the interview in full here

Airbnb confounds for many reasons, though the most obvious one is that its success is based on a business model that ignores one of the first lessons we learn at our mother’s knee: don’t talk to strangers. We can only imagine what the first few investor meetings in 2008 must have been like.

And yet, fast forward nine years and the website – essentially a match-making service between home-owners and visitors looking for an alternative to hotel rooms – has already hosted 123 million nights. It’s also in the midst of seeking additional funding, valuing the company at $30bn – making it the second highest-valued start-up in the US behind Uber.

And like Uber, Airbnb has become a poster-child for the sharing economy, that nebulous but extremely valuable intersection between commerce and human connection. It has recast the idea of privacy, security and personal space. And all because Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, two graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, found a way to take the components of trust between people who had never met, and design for it. ‘We didn’t come up with anything new,’ says Gebbia, now chief product officer. ‘There were many websites like ours. Why did ours take off? Luck and timing played a part. The 2008 recession led people to consider new ways of earning supplemental income. But I believe the key difference was design...’ Read the interview in full here

Therme Vals was completed in 1996, the same year this magazine was founded. It was clearly a good year. Two decades on, Peter Zumthor’s genre-defining spa in the Swiss canton of Graubünden remains a place of pilgrimage for architecture enthusiasts the world over. And Zumthor is now one of the world’s most sought-after architects.

Zumthor is not your typical internationally-operating, Pritzker Prize-winning architect, even if there is such a thing. He has no offices in London, New York or Zurich, preferring instead to base himself in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Haldenstein, where he has lived and worked for more than 40 years. At his atelier, staff are not found glued to shiny Apple Macs but gathered around physical models of buildings – working prototypes lifted up on stilts to eye level – while beyond those models, breathtaking wraparound views stretch out across the Grisonian Rhine Valley. The practice is small, deliberately limited to around 30 people, making it a necessity to be very choosy about the projects it takes on. Which is what makes it really different.

Looking back over the last 20 years since Therme, the projects Zumthor has designed have been dictated not by commercial opportunity, but by where architecture can make a real difference to the human experience. Where architecture can bring joy, peace, insight or energy. You know you’re in a Zumthor building not because you notice any trademark shapes or materials, but because of how it makes you feel... Read the interview in full here

It is now the norm for fashion designers to dabble in other forms. Hedi Slimane, Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld and JW Anderson are all serious, serial dabblers. This is the age of the new polymath, the cross-disciplinary curator, the imperial taste-maker. But there is one designer who has gone much further; who, over the last 20 years, has relocated fashion, pulled it out of its self-referential loops and plugged it into a larger, more powerful network of ideas and influences.

Raf Simons originally trained in industrial and furniture design in Genk, Belgium – the country where he was born and raised and where his eponymous menswear line is based. After interning with Walter Van Beirendonck and then watching a Martin Margiela show in Paris, which Simons has described as nothing short of a revelation, he turned instead to fashion. He founded his own label in 1995.

That unconventional start explains Simons’ mould-breaking approach to designing clothing. ‘I always wanted to find other ways, explore other ways,’ he says. Focusing on menswear, Simons has subtly and insistently proposed new ways of dressing men. His radicalism has not only affected the way entire generations of men dress, but how generations of fashion designers create their clothes. The designs of youthful labels like Hood By Air or Off-White are tied up with ideas Simons has explored over the past 20 years... Read the interview in full here

Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is a harbinger of change in the fashion industry. In barely 18 months, his work has perceptibly moved goalposts and his impact is hard to overstate, certainly when it comes to recent fashion. Indeed, you’d have to dive back to the 1990s to find anything similar. Ironically, if you do so, you’ll find it was once again at Gucci that the status quo shifted, under the tenure of Tom Ford. Exactly 20 years apart, both used the Italian leather goods behemoth to ring in the changes, to provoke, challenge and ultimately seduce. Both have proved, within the space of mere seasons, to be the dominant fashion stories of their respective periods.

Michele and Ford’s visions for Gucci, on the surface, are polar opposites. Indeed, Michele’s obsession is with elaborating his surfaces, in homage to the Italiano eccentrico styles commonly associated with designers like Walter Albini, the interwar couturier Elsa Schiaparelli or the Milanese fashion editor Anna Piaggi. It stands in stark contrast to Ford’s midcentury modern-tinged minimalism, the sartorial equivalent of an Eames lounger, of lean tailoring and jersey evening dresses with insets of metal. Slick was the word most often used to describe Ford’s vision for Gucci, from the shiny polished catwalks of his biannual shows through to the glistening double-G insignias dripping from bags and belts. There’s nothing slick about what Michele does – it’s more sick, a mix of oddball references and strange proportions that have some beauty to them, to hamfistedly paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon... Read the interview in full here

Towering above his employees and most of his guests, with flowing locks and a beard as white as his linen trousers and moccasins, Brazilian mining magnate and modern-day Medici Bernardo Paz looks a little like God as he goes about his mission of building heaven on earth.

In Paz’s contemporary garden of Eden, Inhotim, every detail has been designed to reset the way visitors live their lives. The sprawling utopia, an hour from his home town of Belo Horizonte and designed as a perfect marriage of art, nature and architecture, is much more than a playground for an eccentric millionaire. It’s Paz’s gift to the world – a beautiful, peaceful place from a man whose name means peace. Mines, as the inhabitants of Paz’s home state of Minas Gerais know only too well, are a finite resource, and the Mineiros, as the locals are known, have seen their riches shipped off to the world for nearly two centuries – with all too little to show for it.

Paz has turned the concept of one-off extraction on its head, using the wealth accumulated from gouging iron ore from the mountains that surround Belo Horizonte to plant the seeds of a contemporary crop, one he believes will bear fruit ‘for a thousand years’. The profits – more than $250m – generated from shipping three million tonnes of iron ore a year to mills in Brazil and China, are ploughed into his dream.

‘I want to create a state of mind,’ he says. ‘The hardest thing is to change the way people see the world, but beauty changes people’s lives...’ Read the interview in full here

By the early 1990s, Kazuyo Sejima already had experience at Toyo Ito’s office, her own studio and a Young Architect of the Year award from the Japan Institute of Architects under her belt. But it was after setting up SANAA (with Ryue Nishizawa) in 1995 that her career really took off, upscaling to major cultural commissions which transformed her into an international go-to choice for mesmerisingly barely-there, ethereal architecture.

Her signature style of strong shapes and clean lines that at the same time appear flowing and delicate has helped define 21st-century Japanese architecture. It is all about the experience for Sejima, although priorities have shifted somewhat since her early days in practice. ‘Our designs are not driven by what you can do with architecture itself, but by an interest in the way people experience space as a relationship between programme, city and surrounding landscape,’ she says. ‘In the past, I would try to understand the overall character of a building’s environment and use this abstract idea to develop a design. Today, I try to create spaces that are more precisely adapted to the variable character of a neighbourhood...’ Read the interview in full here

There was a time when Japanese food meant exactly the same thing wherever you were, whatever the occasion and budget: sashimi, teppanyaki, sushi, teriyaki and tempura. In the 1990s, however, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa changed all that when he launched his deliriously inventive spin on classic Japanese tropes layered with nuanced South American influences, Peruvian specifically – yellowtail sashimi jalapeño and tempura eel, for instance.

From the start, a strong stylish streak has run through all of Matsuhisa’s projects. When the first Nobu opened in New York in 1994, he tapped David Rockwell for the interiors. ‘I explained to David the importance of the flow of the kitchen and the connection between the kitchen and the sushi bar. He understood both what I wanted and my style of cooking, and was able to translate my vision into a beautiful restaurant.’

It’s a formula that Matsuhisa has repeated over the years with great success. Within a few months of the first issue of Wallpaper*, he partnered with Robert De Niro, restaurateur Drew Nieporent, and Singaporean hotelier Christina Ong to open his first European outpost in London’s Metropolitan Hotel. Nobu London was the proverbial instant success. Every night, the deliberately austere dining room was mobbed by the city’s beau monde – every table swooning over the celebrated (and much imitated) black cod and miso. Within a year, it owned a Michelin star... Read the interview in full here

Illustration: Eoin Ryan

To paraphrase Sinatra, 1996 was a very good year. Wallpaper* was launched, Richard Geoffroy was promoted to chef de cave at Dom Pérignon and, very appropriately, that year produced an extraordinary vintage that, two decades on, is still talked about. ‘Normally, the great wines come from the fine sunny weather. It was the wind that year,’ Geoffroy explains. ‘It drove the dehydration of the grapes and concentrated the juices to produce something baffling, energised, constrained and infinitely youthful.’

On paper, Geoffroy’s credentials are impressive enough – born into a champagne-making family, he is a trained medical doctor and an influential oenologist. In person, he is articulate, smart, jovial, disciplined and passionate about the art of winemaking.

His extraordinary niceness makes it easy to overlook the fact that Geoffroy is an industry powerhouse. He says his relationship with Dom Pérignon is so intimate a line cannot be drawn. ‘We share the same sense of playfulness, completeness, complexity and serenity. Our fundamental core is one of harmony, which is expressed in the tension between winemaking and blending. But we are not flash or ego-driven...' Read the interview in full here

Co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin, CEO of Alphabet and the man behind Mountain View’s ongoing and relentless diversification into every single stratum of our tech-centric lives, Larry Page can lay claim to some serious data. Google is, of course, named for a number – a very big number – so it’s appropriate that any stats culled from the company’s day-to-day operations are suitably mind-boggling. Here are the facts and figures that prove Page will influence our intelligence for decades to come. The man behind the world’s biggest tech influencer conjures up serious stats. See them here...

It’s not a coincidence that, as Hussein Chalayan was presenting his first collections, the first issue of Wallpaper* was also taking shape in London. The designer has been vocal about the impact the magazine and the city had on him from the start. ‘For me, Wallpaper* was where all the different disciplines and facets of lifestyle merged,’ he says. ‘It was a publication that really gelled that together. My interests already included interiors and furniture, so I understood straight away its role in creating a synergy between fashion, interiors, food and travel. They were more isolated before, and I think the magazine is responsible for creating these bridges.’

London in those days ‘was about different creatives working together; there was a very distinct correlation between music and fashion’. Chalayan often collaborated with the singer Björk, who modelled in one of his early shows and famously wore a piece from the designer’s Airmail collection on the cover of her album, Post. ‘In terms of what inspired me, it was mostly music and cultural history...’ Read the interview in full here

Working with Ai Weiwei was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Partly because we had barely a year to make a major exhibition at the RA, but mainly because he’s a profound, uncompromising and heroic individual whose humanity and humour are never far away.

Outside his studio in Caochangdi – a kind of artists’ village in Beijing – the street is lined with surveillance cameras, each one festooned with a red Chinese lantern by Weiwei, the most gentle of subversions. A bike was chained to the lamppost outside the main door – and it had a fresh bunch of flowers in its basket every day until he got his passport back. For most of the time we were working together, it seemed unlikely he would be able to come to London. I went to Beijing five times over the year and every trip I’d ask whether there was any change in attitude from the Chinese authorities. ‘I always remain optimistic, but every time I think the police might return my passport I am disappointed. Perhaps I am naive,’ he told me.

I remembered his exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, soon after his release from prison, where his mother had come instead. Would she, I wondered, be able to come to London if he were unable to travel. ‘She’s too frail now,’ he said. ‘How about your son?’ I asked. ‘I know he’s only six, but maybe he would like to come.’ ‘My son hates London,’ he told me, rather devastatingly. ‘When I was imprisoned I didn’t want him to know details, so he was told Daddy is in London...’ Read the interview in full here

When it comes to supporting the arts, few patrons have made as big a name for themselves as the Miami-based real-estate developer Jorge M Pérez. Founder of the Related Group, part of the property powerhouse behind ambitious urban development projects such as New York’s Hudson Yards, Pérez has not only played a huge part in shaping the modern Miami skyline, but also left his mark on its cultural landscape as well.

In 2013, Pérez’s name became a talking point during the relocation of the Miami Art Museum to a swanky, waterfront home designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Along with its expanded, $220m building, the museum also unveiled a new name: the Pérez Art Museum Miami, an acknowledgement of the $40m donation from the billionaire. Although the naming was unorthodox, PAMM (as it’s affectionately known), has evolved from a municipal-level arts institution to a respected fixture in the international arts scene. Shows have included Ai Weiwei, Julio Le Parc, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes and the New York-based Jamaican artist Nari Ward. Works donated by Pérez, largely by Latin American artists, are also on display... Read the interview in full here

In 1996, Elon Musk – and we realise how quaint this now sounds – did his first million dollar deal. The software company he started in 1995 with $28,000 of his father’s money picked up a $3 million investment and his remarkable career, from software to space via PayPal and sustainable propulsion, was off.

Along the way he has destroyed decades of received wisdom and borrowed business practices and, despite all that, his smartest rivals still think the world of him. As CCO of Aston Martin, Marek Reichman knows a thing or two about building beautiful, cutting-edge cars. It’s thanks to Musk, he says, ‘that our industry is now engaged in a radical rethink of how we create and deliver transportation’... Read the interview in full here

Illustration: Eoin Ryan

Rare now is the fashion brand that doesn’t do art in some way, does not sponsor, show, collaborate or co-mingle with artists and galleries. It can look like a crushing embrace. But one designer has been doing it for longer and with more sophistication and commitment than any other.

Miuccia Prada, who trained as a mime artist before joining the family operation, established the Fondazione Prada in 1993 and began collecting art; seriously and with serious intent. The Rem Koolhaas-designed New York Prada store, or Epicenter, which opened in 2001, was more gallery and performance space than glittering showcase for product. But Prada has been careful to compartmentalise the fashion brand and the Fondazione. It has its permanent curators, commissions as well as collects, and puts on museum-standard shows.

Last year, the Fondazione Prada campus, also designed by OMA, opened in Milan; twice the size of Renzo Piano’s new Whitney in New York and twice the fun. It has redefined what a private gallery can and should be. It’s an engaging new cultural hub for a city known more for commercial thrust and will be Prada’s real legacy... Read the interview in full here

Modesty almost forbids, but only almost. In fact, space doesn’t allow a complete list of our many advances and upshifts, our constant refinements and occasional reinventions over the last 20 years. Here’s just a few to be going on with: establishing the Handmade exhibition as the showcase of contemporary craft and design; creating the perfect pocket-sized travel guide; civilising e-commerce with the W* Store; curating a long-running series of artist-designed covers and back-page artist’s recipes; the encouragement and advancement of wave after wave of young designers and architects; and, of course, smuggling more dubious double entendres onto our covers than any magazine ever.

The shining light flowing into the Fondazione Prada has been hindered for a slight moment. Over the summer months, the windows have been plastered in pop coloured cartoons, but with a subject matter that couldn’t be farther away from playful animation.

This enveloping piece is part of ‘TTT – Template Temples of Tenacity’, a three piece exhibition by multimedia artist Nástio Mosquito. These run in unison with Theaster Gates’ latest show ‘True Value’ in the same location – both interact with day-to-day rituals and trial them to new levels, marking a strong political moment at the Foundation.

But these two shows definitely don’t get tangled. While one openly invites a pious sentiment through choir performances and stained glass windows, the other focuses on a political message via the use of everyday products.

Mosquito’s piece in the windows is strongly titled WEorNOT. Inviting people at the entrance, this is a new site specific piece, illustrated by Ada Diez and produced by Mosquito’s collective Nastivicious, which he devised in collaboration with Vic Pereiró back in 2008. Transforming the Fondazione’s atrium into a ‘contemporary temple’, the vivid stained glass etchings evoke a psychedelic style, but here the figures have guns in hand, stand on philosophical and religious readings, or are in battle. ‘The artist invites us to his most critical endeavour yet,’ curator Elvira Dyangani Ose says. ‘Entering a space and time where judgment and evaluation are suspended, where things do not necessarily need to make sense, where – if one is up to the challenge— we are encouraged to lose ourselves in our own innate sensitiveness.’

Gates’ message is just as powerful, but with a more subtle delivery. Recreating a colour-coordinated hardware store environment on the first floor, the rough and raw pieces hone in on everyday survival. Titled True Value like the show itself, the layout delves into the products as symbols of power and struggle, via the people who encounter them. 'It alludes to the disappearance of local activities and pays tribute to the ready-made and everyday sphere,’ Gates divulges. ‘[It] denounces the failures of capitalism in valuing the individual, or tells the difficulties of a black neighbourhood that is struggling to find a new centre.’

The notion of 'you have to be there' is definitely emphasised with the duo of exhibitions as they both go deeper into their critique with separate performances and events. Mosquito has collaborated with musician Dijf Sanders, artist Chilala Moco and The Golden Guys choir for a performance I Make Love To You. You Make Love To Me. Let Love Have Sex With The Both Of Us and has plans for a cinematic audiovisual piece, Synchronicity Is My Bitch: The Cinematic Experience, in September. Meanwhile, 'True Value' will host a series of public meetings of debates and readings.

INFORMATION

'Nástio Mosquito: TTT – Template Temples of Tenacity' and 'Theaster Gates: True Value' are on view until 25 September. For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

ADDRESS

Fondazione Prada
Largo Isarco
2, 20139 Milano, Italy

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These are trying times for cinema. The commonly tread narrative of accountants trumping artists, and franchises triumphing over independents is a well explored one, but one that continues to carry weight in an era of unparalleled attention deficiency.

Fondazione Prada have countered with ‘Belligerent Eyes’, an experimental film project of sorts, launched in time for the start of the Venice Architecture Biennale and taking place via a series of research and collaborative phases, culminating in fortnightly semi-public panel discussions. Each phase will see an international network of academics and filmmakers – as well as selected participants from external disciplines – share and develop ideas and various academic initiatives revolving around the future of the moving picture.

The project was conceived and designed by architect Luigi Alberto Cippini and developed in collaboration with film director Giovanni Fantoni Modena, who has directed commercials for Coca Cola and Samsung.

The programme kicked off this past weekend with its inaugural project, ‘Transmission Compound’, where a series of seminars focused on the analysis of current communication modalities via contemporary city infrastructures, led by architects John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog of Territorial Agency. Meanwhile, future projects will explore everything from the relevant factors in contemporary image production and the impact of warfare conditions on film and image collection, to the overlap between the study of visual materials and emerging research in the field of neuroscience.

At the same time, ‘5K Confinement’ refers to the reimagining of the Fondazione Prada’s digs on Ca’Corner della Regina in Venice, with influences ranging from modern border control design to the visual ‘bankruptcies’ of international corporate environments.

This isn’t the first time that Fondazione Prada has invested in the film world. The foundation announced the ambitious project back in January during a high-profile screening series at their Milan location (which was co-curated by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and US critic and film scholar Elvis Mitchell), and for several years have produced the ‘Miu Miu Women’s Tales’ series of short films by women directors in partnership with the Venice film festival.

INFORMATION

’Belligerent Eyes - 5K Confinement’ runs until the 11 September. For more information visit the Fondazione Prada website

Photography: Jacopo Farina

ADDRESS

Fondazione Prada 
Ca’ Corner della Regina,
Venice, Italy

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At what point does appropriation become theft? If an act of theft is artistic enough, is it acceptable? Can any art form exist without borrowing from elsewhere?

These are the questions raised by 90 works at a new exhibition curated by Thomas Demand at Fondazione Prada, Milan. The works – dating back to 1820, right up to the present – prove that these questions on authorship, ownership and creativity have a long history in art practice, and with the vast proliferation of free information and images on the net, they’re even more of a preoccupation for artists – and viewers – to address in the present. 

Carved into three overarching sections, L’Image Volee (The Stolen Image) deals with the physical and conceptual contemplations of the theme. First off, Demand has pulled together works that explicitly refer to the criminal act of stealing – or that commit a theft in order to make their art. This includes a work by American artist Richard Artschwager (known for his architectural motifs and Formica works). Artschwager commissioned his work – a Persian carpert entitled Stolen Rug, 1969 – to be stolen from the exhibition in which it was to appear in Chicago. Other pieces, such as Richter-Modell (interconti), 1987 – a coffee table made from a Richter painting by Martin Kippenberger – present works literally made from existing art works.

This leads neatly on to artists who re-make other artists’ artwork. Confused? That’s part of the effect of Appropriation Art such as Elaine Sturtevant’s Duchamp Man Ray Portrait, a piece from 1966, which creates a sense of vertigo that is not unlike the feeling of endlessly scrolling on the Internet.  

Appropriation is discussed too in the collages of John Stezaker and Wangechi Mutu.

At a certain point, the spectator becomes the spectated. Of the works to watch out for are Baldessari’s Blue Line (Holbein) installation, 1988, fitted with a hidden camera that takes pictures of visitors; and Sophie Calle’s L’Hotel – stealthy shots the artist took of unmade beds and belongings in unoccupied rooms while working as a maid at a hotel in Venice. This section brings the exhibition’s discussion full circle, drawing a parallel between voyeurism and surveillance and the process of observing and making art that is then observed and consumed.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

ADDRESS

Largo Isarco, 2, 20139 Milano, Italy

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Goshka Macuga’s new show has opened at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Several works are exhibited atop ’Before the Beginning and After the End’, Macuga’s site-specific collaboration with Patrick Tresset, including John Andrea’s ’Arden Anderson and Norma Murphy’ (foreground), 1972

The Polish-born, London-based artist Goshka Macuga ripped into Milan like a firecracker last night, dazzling with the debut of an outstanding new show at the Fondazione Prada. The first maverick move of the night? Setting her human boyfriend next to her new, fascinatingly real-looking robot (impeccably modelled on said boyfriend) and snapping several photos of the ‘twins’ with her own iPhone.

The android was a perfect replica of his human counterpart, right down to a bushy black beard, curly hair, big brown eyes and immaculate jawline. ‘The only thing missing is the sparkle in his eye!’ Macuga remarked, while admiring the sheen of the robot’s skin.

Manufactured in Japan by a company called A-Lab, Macuga’s android is the nucleus of an intriguing show entitled ‘To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll’, dedicated, in part, to ‘humanity’s concern over the end of mankind’.

Sprawling through the vast exhibition space, it features installations, performances by humans and robots, as well as new works and curated pieces from the Fondazione Prada’s vast collection. The dense jumble defies easy description, even for the artist herself – ‘I really can’t put it into a few words,’ she said on the sidelines of the well-attended opening. ‘How much time do you have?’ – but a preoccupation with a post-human state seems to be the unifying theme.

Certainly, the show’s energy is remarkable. Some of the most electric moments were to be had in a trio of rooms featuring 73 cast bronze heads of historic heavyweights, from Einstein to Freud, which were speared onto shiny metal rods and linked together to look like giant molecular structures. In another room, machines drew illustrations on huge reams of white paper, like robotic hands. Elsewhere, at Fondazione Prada’s 15th-century studiolo, Macuga had stationed an actress, who recited excerpts from Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection in Esperanto.

How exciting to see that following all the buzz surrounding the Fondazione Prada’s glittering opening, shows like this prove it’s the real deal.

’International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 6, Humanity’s Survival: Jared Diamond, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Bacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Crutzen, Nick Bostrum, HP Lovecraft, Michel Foucault’, by Goshka Macuga, 2015

’Al la filo de la homo kiu manĝis la skribrulaĵon’, by Goshka Macuga, 2016. In Fondazione Prada’s 15th-century marquetry studiolo, an actress recites excerpts from Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection in Esperanto. Performer: Valeria Sara Costantin

Macuga’s works are surrounded by a selection of pieces from the Prada Collection. From left: ’"Negotiation sites" after Saburo Murakami’, by Goshka Macuga, 2016; ’Float’, by Robert Breer, 1970 (2000); ’The Golden Sphere’, by James Lee Byars, 1992; ’Extrusion’, by Thomas Heatherwick, 2009; ’Cubo’, by Alberto Giacometti, 1934; ’Concetto spaziale. Natura’, by Lucio Fontana, 1982; and ’Colpo di gong’, by Eliseo Mattiacci, 1993

INFORMATION

’Goshka Macuga: To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll’ runs until 19 June 2016. For more information, visit the Fondazione Prada website

Installation photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada

ADDRESS

Largo Isarco, 2
20139 Milan
Italy

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Konstantin Grcic and Patricia Urquiola need little in the way of introduction. Their always exceptional design work has earned them multiple and regular appearances in the pages of this magazine. Friends and first team talent for the same design companies, and joint winners of last year’s Wallpaper* Designer of the Year gong, the pair joined forces on this year’s judging panel. 

Meeting at Fondazione Prada in Milan – with Urquiola’s husband, and Grcic’s partner and baby daughter patiently in tow – the duo discussed who got top marks and why, across 11 different categories.

They admit they came to the task reluctantly – no designer is comfortable sitting in judgement on the work of peers, friends and colleagues. Luckily, many of the Judges’ Awards categories don’t require this kind of discomfort. And in others, the result was so clear cut there was little need for tortured debate. The Fondazione Prada, winner of Best New Public Building, was a case in point.

‘There were no compromises made,’ observes Grcic of the sprawling complex. It was designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, which transformed seven early-20th-century buildings and designed three new structures, all of which pop up and play harmoniously in the vast campus. ‘The choice of architect, and the time span of developing such a project in all of its detail, make the building stand for the kind of quality that we see so rarely today.’ 

Urquiola agrees. ‘This kind of attitude, to think but then to also act, is so important,’ she says of Prada’s CEO Patrizio Bertelli and his wife and creative director Miuccia Prada, who spent over a decade planning the project. ‘As someone who lives in Milan, they have really given us something special,’ she adds.  

Urquiola was spellbound by the foamy, air-pierced aluminium that wraps around many of the foundation’s walls and inspired the pair’s on-site illustration of the space, created for this month’s limited-edition subscriber cover. ‘I’ve often seen this material but it’s never been well proposed,’ Urquiola says. ‘The way it’s been used here is fantastic.’ 

The designers were also in accord when it came to the Designer of the Year award. 

‘All of the contenders were great,’ Grcic says. ‘But the Bouroullec brothers have done such fantastic work over such a long period of time, they deserve it just a little bit more than the others. They’ve been going at it for 15 years, always at the top level. It’s incredible.’

‘It was very easy for me,’ Urquiola agrees. ‘They did a fantastic job this year.’ 

Other categories mulled over by our duo were Best New Hotel, which went to the Aman Tokyo (‘I’ve been there,’ says Urquiola. ‘The entrance is an incredible piece of architecture’); Best City, which went to Copenhagen (‘They seem to be creating a city for today for a citizen for today,’ remarks Grcic. ‘It’s very open minded’); and the twin fashion awards with Best Men’s Fashion Collection A/W 2015 going to Stefano Pilati at Ermenegildo Zegna Couture and the womenswear award for the same season handed to Phoebe Philo at Céline.

‘I feel very inspired by good fashion designers and what they’re able to do,’ Grcic says. ‘We keep designing tables, chairs and storage. They have to redesign the jacket, shirt and trousers. The choice of materials, fabrics and the construction of something three-dimensional is very interesting.

As originally featured in the February 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*203)

See the Design Awards 2016 in full – including our extra-special Judges' Awards - here

INFORMATION

Photography: Gianluca Fontana

Delfina Delettrez Fendi, the latest in a line of creative female entrepreneurs with her surname, set up her jewellery company in 2007, at the age of 20. Her unique aesthetic, combining the surreal and contemporary with classic goldsmith techniques, made her the youngest designer to be included in the permanent collection of fine jewellery at the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

Judging our awards was, she maintains, a fun and inspiring experience: ‘I appreciate the idea that design can embrace so many different categories and visions.’ Among her prize picks was the Lattice House by Sameep Padora & Associates: ‘The material doesn’t look like timber but almost a metal, and the house doesn’t look like a house. It looks impenetrable from the outside, but from the inside it is the complete opposite. I loved to imagine the dancing movement of shadows changing with the light during the day.’

Delettrez is also a fan of our Best City, Copenhagen. ‘Its architecture is expanding in a smart way, using natural resources and avant-garde design,’ she says. Meanwhile, Milan provided her with her Best New Public Building, the Fondazione Prada. ‘I observed when I first visited the complex on a grey and rainy day that an enormous amount of light in the form of reflections changed the perception of the whole area. So not only the foundation tower, but many of the surrounding buildings seemed golden.’

Many of the Judges’ Awards nominees were inspiring, says Delettrez, especially those designers she hadn’t come across before: ‘I was happy to discover Max Lamb’s work. Especially the 'Marmoreal Black' bathroom. Divine!’

As originally featured in the February 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*203)

See the Design Awards 2016 in full – including our extra-special Judges' Awards - here

It seems entirely fitting that the frankly remarkable new Fondazione Prada kicks its curatorial programme into top gear with the meticulous speed-freak minimalism of Italian artist Gianni Piacentino. Curated by Germano Celant, the exhibition, taking over two levels of the complex’s Podium galleries, includes 100 pieces, covering Piacentino’s career from 1965 to today.

Turin-based Piacentino, now 72, was a key figure in the development of the Arte Povera movement but quickly went his own way. And quickly. Piacentino is obsessed with vintage motorbikes and aeroplanes and many of his works are pared down abstractions of these dream machines; bits of wing or engineless frames and chassis, but always precisely engineered and beautifully finished (Piacentino restores and repaints vintage bikes for fun and was, for a short while, a professional bike racer). A dab hand at everything from websites to print catalogues, Piacentino even produced a limited edition cover for Wallpaper* earlier this year (W*196).

Piacentino’s work is a kind of Pop influenced minimalism, high on speed and paint fumes and the heavy then delicate artisanship of the body shop. As Celant says, Piacentino’s art roars out of somewhere ‘between art and design, craftsmanship and manufacturing, the useful and the useless, singularity and seriality.’ And is born of a ‘background culture rich with applied sciences, artisan expertise, mechanical precision and engineering processes.’ Vroom vroom. Except not quite, not just. There is something plainly elegiac in the work, slow and reverent. For Celant, Piacentino’s career represents ‘an absolute escape from the imperfection, instantaneity and randomness of making art, in order to access a universe of perfection, calculation and concentration that can compete with a motor or flight vehicle, on both sublime and absolute levels.’

INFORMATION

’Gianni Piacentino’ is on view until 10 January 2016 at Fondazione Prada website

Celebrated film director Wes Anderson has brought his stylised vision to Bar Luce, a bar and café integrated within Fondazione Prada’s startling new outpost in Milan’s Largo Isarco industrial district. Affectionately paying homage to the great Milanese café, the interior emulates these in the filmmaker’s inimitable brand of kitsch, with pastel tones and patterned wallpaper knowingly recreating the vaulted glass ceiling and dense tiers of the city’s symbolic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Another rich source of inspiration was the local popular culture of the 1950s and 60s, with a pink-flecked floor and veneered wood wall panels referencing the era while the sound of classic Italian crooners drifts dreamily from a vintage jukebox. 'I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in,' Anderson explained. For devotees of the auteur, nods to his oeuvre should prove irresistible – amuse yourself on the customised Steve Zissou pinball machine, while appreciating the playful atmosphere and Formica tabletops borrowed piecemeal from his short film Castello Cavalcanti.

ADDRESS

Fondazione Prada Milano
Largo Isarco 2

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Milan is having an uncharacteristically hip moment.  Despite messy logistics and half-baked construction, The Expo has revitalised the city’s spiritual shroud, while iconic public figures such as Giorgio Armani have helped buoy the wave of attention with a new fashion museum and a recent Hollywood-studded 40th anniversary event.  But no one has done more to shine a truly long-term, international and bright lens on this city than Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli who will open the doors to their long-awaited Fondazione Prada on 9 May.

In the works for more than a decade, the Fondazione opens with 'Serial Classic', an exhibit curated by Salvatore Settis, and lives up to every bit of hype that has swirled around it. The project is massively ambitious – 10 different buildings packed with a dazzling selection of contemporary and modern art sprawl like a labyrinth across 19,000 sq meters — and is just as satisfying.

‘People keep asking me if this is an art gallery, a public museum or a private foundation,’ Bertelli told us in a private preview of the substantial compound.  ‘In truth, we wanted to make a space that was an aggregate of all three. It is very homogeneous and at the same time very heterogeneous.’

Visually, the Fondazione Prada is an intriguing hodge-podge of different buildings, styles, spatial sizes, creative themes and time periods.  Shiny mirrored surfaces battle against raw concrete interiors;  tiny, intimate rooms contrast with vacuous warehouse-sized hangars.  Without a typical plan, the discovery process unfolds without a pre-ordained path, though a stop in the Wes Anderson-designed cafe, wrapped in tromp l’oeil wallpaper recreating Milan’s famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, would be an excellent place to start.

A former distillery, the location features a disparate mix of seven structures that date back to 1910, plus three new ones (one of which, called Torre, is still under construction) all set within a tall-walled, art-filled campus.  Hundreds of pieces of art have been sourced from both Fondazione Prada’s private collection as well as non-permanent exhibits and site specific installations. 

‘It was our intention to make old and new work seamlessly here,’ observed longtime Prada collaborator Rem Koolhaas, whose OMA architectural firm was charged with designing the compound. ‘At any moment, you can’t really tell if you’re in an old building or a new one.’

Set in the southern section of the city across from bleak railroad tracks, Fondazione Prada’s neighbourhood is in a decidedly un-cool part of town.  ‘What’s fabulous about this area is its industrial quality,’ Koolhaas stressed.  ‘We absolutely do not want to create any gentrification here - this was crucial for all of us.’

The classic Milanese might not be pounding on the surrounding real estate, but the space itself — which unfolds like a creative village with charming public spaces and open-air courtyards — is sure to become a lure, not just for the city’s resident design class, but for top art and architecture scene-makers around the world. And let’s be honest:  this (much more than a six-month, mass, eat-fest) is exactly what the city of Milan needs most.

ADDRESS

Largo Isarco, 2
20139 Milan
Italy

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Watch the Curate award's video call out for entries

In the olden days, if you wanted to be cool and impress your friends, you started playing records in public and called yourself a DJ. Now you create a website, or even hire a physical space, and call yourself a 'curator'. Others simply rebrand themselves and insist they've been curators all along. Indeed, social media means we can all be curators now. Anything and everything is Pinteresting.

The Curate award, a joint initiative from the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) and the Prada Foundation, at once seeks to encourage this urge, if encouragement were needed, and reward those with a genuinely fresh and forward-looking take on curatorial practice.

The competition, launched today, is open to everyone and the winner will get to curate their own show next year in either Qatar or Italy. The extremely heavyweight judging panel includes chair of the QMA, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani; Miuccia Prada; Rem Koolhaas; Lebanese film-maker and actress Nadine Labaki; Nawal El Moutawakel, the first woman from a Muslim majority country to win an Olympic gold medal; and super curator and co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Aspiring curators can upload a video outlining their proposal on to the Curate website as of today. The jury - who say they will 'judge ideas on their creativity and social significance ' - will winnow the entries down to the wheatiest 20 which will then be showcased on the site. The public can then enter the selection process, picking their favourite entry. A winner will be announced next Spring.

In a collective statement the judging panel said: 'The notion of "curating" no longer belongs just to the museum. With the development of digital and social media, it has now become possible for anyone to participate in the selection, editing and communication of ideas. We hope that people, whatever their age or background, will make the most of the opportunity offered by Curate to think about the future potential of exhibition making, where there are no imposed boundaries to media, scale, content and formats, and ideas, whether from the fields of science or the arts, can come from anywhere.'

The Curate award also aims to trigger a dialogue about the ingredients of a truly inspiring exhibition. The question has already been put to leading figures in the art world, such as Takashi Murakami. 'For me, an inspiring exhibition is one like Paul Schimmel's Helter Skelter,' says the Japanese artist. 'It introduces new artists while also challenging the audience's view of not only art but society in general, and possesses the revolutionary energy to change the structure of the art world itself.' Meanwhile, Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi picked out a rather unusual contender for the best show he has ever witnessed. 'My choice as the most inspiring ever was a sculpture exhibition for the blind,' he says. 'It was held at the Tate in the mid seventies under the supervision of Henry Moore.'

Check back here soon to hear more from the judges about the art of curation and to see some of the fruits of the global search. Plus tell us about the best exhibition you have ever witnessed on Twitter, using the hashtag #OperationCurate.