Curated by Butti, the 5th edition of Lake Como Design Festival offers an updated reading of Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedia
The 2023 edition of Lake Como Design Festival will take place from September 16th to 24th in the city of Como, through a series of exhibitions, meetings, installations and diffuse events. Lake Como Design Festival is a fixed annual event, accompanying visitors on a discovery of the artistic and architectural heritage of Lake Como.
Festival’s creator and artistic director Lorenzo Butti, when asked in his opinion what makes Lake Como the right location for such an event, says that Lake Como is a territory that is not an annex of Milan. It constitutes a motherhouse because it’s where the first group of abstract painters were born, architects, uncompromising artists, and rationalists. A design festival relates and connects the heritage in a way that is different to Milan.
There is a world of design and art to be seen at Lake Como, sometimes visitors flock to nearby Milan and Mr. Butti desires to make Lake Como seen as a hotspot for creativity.
Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder inspires the LCDF’s 2023 edition
This year, the fifth edition of Lake Como Design Festival is named after Naturalis Historia, the encyclopedia in thirty-seven volumes by Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder – born in Como on 23 AD – which for centuries represented a source of knowledge for scientists and intellectuals.
Hosted in historical, unpublished or forgotten places in the city and the surrounding area, the festival aims to make the public discover the artistic and architectural heritage of its territory through a variety of cultural proposals: «In these years we have built a reality that manages to bring together design, art and architecture through the contamination of these disciplines and opening up to visitors places with a symbolic value, often closed to the public. The bi-millennium of Pliny the Elder’s birth gives us the opportunity to relate our activity to nature in its broadest sense and investigate the relationship between human and nature».
Lake Como Design Festival’s focus, once again centered on the mingling of art and design, is this year enriched, thanks to the inspiration of Pliny’s work, by transversal contributions from three macro-areas: Botany, Mineralogy and Zoology. This will result in two new exhibitions: Back To Nature and The Other Animals.
Back To Nature and The Other Animals, the themes of Lake Como Design Festival
Located in Villa Olmo, Back To Nature will include a selection of works, projects, objects and furnishing accessories from different realities united by a constant natural inspiration through different epochs and techniques.
Built in neoclassical style by the Swiss-Italian architect Simone Cantoni during the Eighteenth century, Villa Olmo is one of the main symbols of the city and its lake. The central room will be transformed into a meeting and discussion area to host the evening talk cycle, this year curated by journalist Armando Besio, and the official festival bookshop, where the theme will be further explored with a selection of dedicated publications.
Hosted by the Municipality of Como at the Palazzo del Broletto and realized in collaboration with a board of ‘selectors’ from different fields, The Other Animals will consist in a group exhibition of works, objects and furnishing accessories that will bring the theme of zoology to the stage.
Curated by Lorenzo Butti and Massimiliano Mondelli, President of Accademia Pliniana, the exhibition will open the doors not only to design but also to contemporary art, archaeology and craftsmanship, touching different worlds. A journey through time, through different styles, materials and production techniques in close dialogue with the words of Pliny the Elder.
Contemporary Design Selection and Wonderlake Como tours at LCDF
Contemporary Design Selection will play a key role in Lake Como Design Festival this year as well. Again, realized in collaboration with Catawiki, the open call for independent designers, publishers and galleries dedicated to contemporary design is curated for the first time by Giovanna Massoni, an independent curator and consultant working in the field of design and visual arts. The exhibition will be hosted in Villa Salazar, opened to the public for the first time.
Contemporary Design Selection will be also guided by the theme of the event, Naturalis Historia. The exhibition will focus on design as a shared and interconnected repertoire of objects and experiments, materials and technologies that challenge climate change and the scarcity of natural resources, thus bringing Pliny the Elder’s research and work up to date. The works presented by the exhibitors will be sold through an online auction organized by Catawiki.
Lake Como Design Festival renewed, also for this year edition, the partnership with Wonderlake Como, which will offer guided tours with a focus on Rationalist architecture in Como.
Lake Como Design Festival 2022: Neo-Nomadism as the main them of the previous edition
For last year’s fourth edition of the festival, the chosen theme was Neo-nomadism, which reflects the concept of moving between real and digital worlds through new moments of culture and labor.
These movements have always been featured throughout the history of humans but are now more relevant than ever thanks to the global economic and climate state. The festival explored how the movement of people is a defining element of our current age, that is simultaneously influencing creativity.
The idea behind the festival’s 2022 edition was that nomadism has always been intertwined with forms of mobility, through information, money, or goods, but it’s the human mobility that characterizes the history of humans from ancient times to today. Nowadays the forms of mobility have expanded, such as for work, study, or global events like the Olympics or exhibitions, along with urban commuting, summer holidays, weekends outside the city, the list could go on forever.
Mr. Butti and Francesca Alfano Miglietti, curator of exhibition ERRANTI, also paid attention to the negative connotation the concept of nomadism has recently obtained, linking it to migrants, people moving to escape wars or climate disasters, or humanitarian crises. The two creative figures explained that for them nomadism is a word that doesn’t deserve to be thought of as negative, instead to be pondered upon as something exciting, to spark curiosity, a piece of broader transformation. It’s one of the infinite choices that humans can identify with. This theme has always been linked to art, design, cinema, and the world of general knowledge. Further, nomadism is aligned with knowing and exploring, the problem of borders in art doesn’t exist.
Francesca Alfano Miglietti at Lake Como Design Festival 2022
ERRANTI, the exhibition curated by FAM for the festival’s fourth edition, was a journey. She mentioned a quote, as Kandinskij said, ‘For years, I have tried to get viewers to walk around in my painting. I wanted to force them to forget about themselves, to even disappear in there’. FAM wanted visitors to immerse themselves in the pieces. ERRANTI was a pilgrimage through the visions of artists, their images and atmospheres, but also a one-way ticket towards abstraction, ending with visitors questioning their idea regarding contemporary art.
ERRANTI in English means ‘those who wonder’, while referring to nomadic people as well as those who distance themselves from society in the correct way, according to FAM. The words wandering and error have a common root in the Italian language. Error is closely linked to the idea of errant knights in novels, adventurers obsessed by their actions and driven by never-ending journeys. Wandering and actions of the knights are dominated by unpredictable presence of error.
ERRANTI, FAM’s exhibition touches the Neo-nomadism topic in 2022
Today’s current culture can be defined as a hybrid. Now more than ever, knowledge, awareness, art, and philosophy are all born from the encounter between individuals with stories often based on very different experimental and conceptual backgrounds. Cultures have always been hybrid and on the move, but ERRANTI showed through an artistic channel how exactly it has been done and gave various interpretations.
FAM claimed its culture that moves us, pushes us into unexpected territories, makes us see different points of views that we didn’t even know existed: «I think of culture as a hybrid, something changing constantly, reshuffling, aggregating and recomposing itself in the flow of meaning that circulates daily in the current landscape». In Neo-nomadism, nothing is fixed, nothing is pure, cultures follow mixed logics and draw from the strength that allows everyone to create their own way of adapting to the environment. FAM wanted to stimulate visitors to reflect upon the idea of departing, her exhibition wasn’t done to show, but to let people know of something new or make them aware.
ERRANTI featured twenty artists, all chosen based on their poetics and the concept of wandering in their art. There are many artists who investigate and analyze this methodology of working and ERRANTI featured a small section of pieces where visitors could seemingly wander within the art. Photographs, installations, objects and videos stimulated visitors to reflect on the idea of departing and the work itself as a nomadic condition linked between symbolic and physical areas. The combination between pieces and physical spaces allowed visitors to become active, pay attention and wander freely.
Lake Como Design Festival
Lake Come Design Festival 2023 will take place from September 16th to 24th in various locations of the city of Como. Among these there are: Villa Olmo and Palazzo del Broletto.
