Aldo Cibic, Italian Designer: Culture is the Strongest Bridge We can Build
Date：2023-07-24
During the third dialogue of the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative, Aldo Cibic, an architect and designer from Milan, recounted his experiences as a curator for two exhibitions in Shanghai, which has reinforced his belief that “culture is the strongest bridge that we can build”. The first exhibition, titled Design for Fun, showcased 70 Years of Italian Radical Design, where a playful environment was created to highlight avant-garde designs. The second exhibition, A World of Beauty, displayed 70 masterpieces from Pompeii and the Farnese Collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, engaging the Chinese public through emotional experiences and harmonious design elements. Prof. Cibic emphasized the power of culture to foster deep respect and understanding between different nations and envisioned it as a strong bridge for a hopeful and complex future.
Aldo Cibic, an Italian architect, founder of Cibicworkshop, focuses on alternative sustainable project types. His projects have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and his design pieces and drawings are exhibited in the permanent collections of prestigious museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Aldo Cibic is also an Honorary Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai and an Honorary Professor of Urban Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Full text of the speech
Hello, everybody. Thank you, David, for the kind invitation. To introduce briefly myself, I'm Aldo Cibic, an architect and designer from Milan, an honorary professor—I'm teaching also at Tongji University in Shanghai, one of the founders of the Memphis design movement, and the curator of Venice Pavilion at Biennale 2015. This year, I'm also being Italian Design Ambassador in Shanghai for the Italian Design Day. And since 5 years I live in Shanghai, which is a city that I love more and more.
This topic is very sensitive for us, in the sense that in the last year, we had the opportunity to realize two exhibitions at MAP—the Museum of Art Pudong, promoted and organized by the Shanghai Italian Institute of Culture. It's a beautiful museum designed by Jean Nouvel, a French architect. The museum is now the number one on the ranking of Chinese museums.
Design for Fun is the title of the first exhibition we have done, and the topic was 70 Years of Italian Radical Design. In this case, we have created a very playful environment, documented the incredible variety of avant-garde designs that Italy has produced since the 60s.
Regarding the other exhibition I mentioned—the title is A World of Beauty—is the one I love the most in my life. It was showing 70 masterpieces from Pompeii, from the Farnese Collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. It was the first time that these pieces left Italy.
The challenge has been to design an environment and to tell a story which could deeply engage the Chinese public. What we have done has been to produce a sense of beauty through an emotional experience, given by a harmonious combination of different rooms with colors, with darkness, with very inspiring quotes. The people, for example, they were just taking pictures of the quotes to involve them in the issue. I mean, for the visitors, it was a very comprehensible and also a moving way to show these pieces.
In the process of the making of the exhibition, there is a moment that I think I'd never forget. It's when, one afternoon, in a video call between Madame Li, the director of the MAP, and Paolo Giulierini, the Director of the Archaeological Museum of Naples, while they were speaking to each other, the feeling was a special, deep, and sincere reciprocal respect. In a way, it's like for the first time, I realized how culture is able to generate a deep and sincere reciprocal respect between people apparently so distant. So it was really, I mean, the emotion of understanding that we have to do as much as we can to increase the cultural exchange in order to overcome all the difficulties that we have in understanding each other.
So, culture is the strongest bridge we can build—in this case, it was between China and Italy, but I think for this complicated future, it's the biggest hope for all of us.
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