There are monsters and freaks, fantastical creatures, burlesque dancers in Mata Hari-like costumes and robotic futuristic ladies at Lasvit's "Monster Cabaret" show launched during Milan Design Week at the recently restored venue of the Teatro Gerolamo (until 22nd April).
The idea was simple – presenting a new and very original collection of pieces full of colours and bizarre shapes by a group of versatile well-respected designers who reinterpreted the monster theme – and doing so via a fun and surreal show.
Over one hundred Neverending Glory chandeliers by Plecháč & Henry Wielgus Jan shine on the stage, providing a very original background story for the performers.
Lasvit's art director Maxim Velčovský's "The Independant", a totemic structure, comprising 111 televisions strapped to its body to broadcast "its master's voice", primordially rises instead from the middle of the auditorium, hinting at mind control via digital images.
A pack of glass monsters, some small, others bigger and including glassware and lighting collections, look down from the third floor of this theatre originally built for puppet shows.
There are no monstrosities, but extremely ironic, joyful and crazy pieces, all of them created in glass in collaboration with the best Bohemian artisans, with the hope of striking a link between glass as an eternal material and monsters as timeless and immortal presences.
The best thing about the pieces on display is their diversity: there is a scarily irresistible design fable behind the "Who's Looking At You" mirror by Maurizio Galante and Tal Lacman.
The piece features 101 pink egg-shaped eyes and green scales, but, though scary, the monster remains a mirror revealing the face of the person reflecting in it, making the onlookers feel monstrous, and at the same time encouraging them to accept the monster within each and everyone of us.
Tales of heroes and monsters are told by the vintage piece "Saint George and the Dragon", created in 1925 by Jaroslav Brychta, while a malicious figure from Swiss fairy tales that can drive people mad or make them passionate with an evil eye upon his forehead inspired Raja Schwahn-Reichmann the piece entitled "Dancing dog", a wooden dog with a crystal eye and pieces of colourful glass scattered at its feet.
Playfulness prevails in Flix and Flex, the Golem evoking monsters by designers Fernando and Humberto Campana. They seem to have a vaguely human shape, but actually came down from space as proved by their (glass) skin sculpted in the shape of chips and technologically advanced elements.
There is instead a dichotomy behind Moritz Waldemeyer's Mori Monsters and Maarten Baas's BHSD collection – the pieces look rather cute for what regards their shape, but they may be hiding something sinister inside them.
Waldemeyer's designs – inspired by two monsters originating in Persian mythology, the Ghoul, a grave-digging spirit which devours the dead, and Jen, an evil spirit who takes possession of people's bodies and inhabits them – come in transparent glass, but LED lights inside them summon up the monster within.
Maarten Baas's monsters are instead named like scientific discoveries in a laboratory (BHSD-001, BHSD-002, BHSD-003…) and, though they look cartoonish with their small feet, they do have extremely sharp and scary teeth.
While these are fantasy monsters, Czech Maxim Velčovský opted instead to rediscover and reinterpret a monster from his childhood when he lived in Prague in Lenin Street, located nearby Lenin Metro Station, and learned about Lenin at school and even read fairytales about the Soviet leader. His glass Lenin may look at first glance like an ordinary statue of the leader, but, close up, the statue reveals extremely long and disproportioned left limbs.
Stanislav Müller's geometric and robotic figures are instead lifted from Japanese folklore, but geometry also appears in Alessandro Mendini's rhombic vases Rombo 1 and 2, in five different combinations of colours and with a face that has lot its humanity to become rigidly robotic.
There are also more subtle interpretations of monsters such as the minimalist ones by Oki Sato, chief designer of Nendo, that are based on the invisible and elusive yōkai spirits from Japanese folklore. The designer in this case suggests us there are four different "somethings" under a glass sheet – something small, something long, something jagged and something big – but we can't actually see what the monsters look like, we can only perceive their presence by the shape they trace under the glass.
There is instead a kind of crazy irony in Fabio Novembre's Pinocchio-meets-Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian man "Toyboy", a glass man with five limbs that actually hint at the world of sex toys.
Apart from being fun, this unique glass artwork collection featuring 16 designers actually reflects the monstrosity of our times: interviewed about their personal monsters for the advertising materials accompanying the event, the designers involved mentioned modern horrors like wars, racism, intolerance, violence, narrow-mindedness, greed, fascism and stupidity.
But is it possible to talk about such serious issues with a cabaret show and a design display and actually manage to reach out to visitors? Yes, it is.
Lasvit received the final confirmation that this format worked pretty well yesterday when its "Monster Cabaret" won the coveted wooden horse of the prestigious Milano Design Award for its installation that, combining exclusive glass designs and dancers from Prague burlesque, interpreted at its best the nature of interior design offering a future conceptual vision for this discipline. You'd better join the design freaks while they're in town then.
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