The history of industrial manufacturing in Italy boasts a few entrepreneurs that strongly believed in the power of art, among the others Antonio Ratti.
Ratti founded in 1945 a silk manufacturing company in Como to make silk textiles and accessories. Ratti loved textiles, but also felt, a bit like Adriano Olivetti and Max Mara's founder Achille Maramotti, that industrial production had to be matched with a solid cultural interest to produce something genuinely innovative and truly iconic.
His intents were clear from the early days of the company: in 1958 Tito Spini created a pioneering complex for Ratti's company, the Palazzina dei Servizi Sociali, that was used as a canteen during the day, while, in the evening, it would host concerts, theatrical performances, courses, and debates open to the workers. The need to find inspiration for the creation of new textile designs led Antonio Ratti to collect antique textiles from all over the world.
The company in the meantime expanded and, in 1985, Ratti started a non-profit foundation – Fondazione Antonio Ratti (FAR), based in Villa Sucota, Como – promoting cultural and technological and studies focused on textiles and contemporary art, but organising also a wide range of other activities including lectures, seminars and courses.
Ratti launched his foundation to turn his passion for art and textiles into a dynamic force and inject new cultural impulses into his town, helping people who were interested in studying textiles to develop new researches using Ratti's immense textile collection, and sample books.
The foundation also launched in 1995 an Artists' Research Laboratory program, conceived by Annie Ratti: since then young artists from all over the world have had the opportunity to deepen their practices meeting the great masters of the contemporary art scene.
Over the years, the foundation became a reference point for research, an idea incubator, and a place open to exchange and experimentation, while the artists' program allowed the foundation to invite artists and visiting professors from all over the world.
This passion expanded way beyond Italy: in 1995 the Met Museum in New York also opened with the support of the Ratti Foundation, a technologically advanced structure to study and preserve textiles.
"In my life, I have always found inspiration for my creativity in museums. I want others to be able to have the same experience," Ratti said in 1998 and this statement became the principle behind the work of the foundation.
Ratti's collection continued to expand throughout the years, thanks to important donations and acquisitions, and it is now a point of reference for scholars, designers and students, in a nutshell its original mission to educate and inspire continues to our days.
One way to inspire people is through exhibitions: the latest one, "Antonio's Dream: A Journey Through Art and Textiles" has just opened in Como (until 31st January 2022). "Antonio's Dream" is the third event dedicated to the Ratti collection after the exhibition at Palazzo Te in Mantua in 2017, and at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome in 2018.
"Antonio's Dream" is actually a larger and more ambitious project about the entrepreneur's legacy that expands in different locations in Como, intertwining ancient textile research, contemporary works of art and archival materials, linking his art and textile collections with the places where he lived and worked.
The main purpose of the curators in this case was to provide visitors with an architectural and cultural journey between public and private spaces.
The exhibition is indeed hosted in the halls of Villa Olmo and Villa Sucota, in Como, in their parks and in other places in the city.
The heart of the exhibition is Villa Olmo, a short walk from the city centre: archival materials and ancient fabrics interact with the contemporary works of art in the neoclassical rooms of the villa.
Artists who have collaborated with the Foundation over the years – such as John Armleder, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Walid Raad, Yvonne Rainer, Julia Brown, Vincent Ceraudo, Zishi Han and Moira Ricci – have created works designed specifically for these spaces.
A documentary made by Domenico Palma, screening inside the Villa, reveals Antonio Ratti through the words and memories of those who collaborated with him, and shared his dreams and visions.
The exhibition then extends into the gardens of the Villa and into the Chilometro della Conoscenza (Kilometer of Knowledge) path with the works of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Liliana Moro, Giulio Paolini and Rä di Martino.
The journey concludes at Villa Sucota, a historical building on the Como Lake, the final stage of the show and the headquarter of the Antonio Ratti Foundation.
The park of the Villa, which already houses permanent works by Gerry Bibby, Jimmie Durham, Liliana Moro, Matt Mullican and Richard Nonas, features installations by artists who over the years have participated in the Artists' Research Laboratory, including Invernomuto, Daniel Jablonski and Oscar Santillan.
Inside the Villa, visitors can instead explore Antonio Ratti's textile archive in dialogue with works by artists who have collaborated with the institution, from Jimmie Durham to Giuseppe Gabellone, from Mario Garcia Torres and Melanie Gilligan to Joan Jonas, Christina Mackie, Walid Raad and finally Karl Holmqvist, who is also part of the exhibition's opening programme of performances.
Antonio Ratti's extraordinary collection of textiles, originally started in the 1950s and considered as one of the most remarkable in Italy, remains the protagonist of the event: the entrepreneur collected more than 30.000 artifacts from all over the world and a library open to the public with more than 7.800 volumes specialized in textiles, fashion, visual arts and crafts.
Including more than 3300 textile fragments and around 3000 sample books that chart the industrial production of textiles in France and Italy, the collection features pieces from different continents and eras, spanning from the third to the twentieth century.
There are Coptic and Indigenous American textiles; Italian velvets; Indian and European cashmere shawls; French silks; Congolese Kuba cloths; Central Asian ikats, Alsatian printed cottons and Japanese kimonos. A special section is dedicated to the history of the local silk production from Como, including the earliest designs of the founder Antonio Ratti.
Textile fans with excellent memory may recognise some of the samples on display here as they may have seen them in previous textile exhibitions in other Italian institutions like the Prato Textile Museum, but, among the rich damasks, brocades and taffeta fabrics, they will also be able to see a variety of samples with abstract motifs and even sketches on paper.
Last but not least, the exhibition extends to the city, with Alfredo Jaar's installation on the facade of the Casa del Fascio for the opening of the exhibition, and a work by Hans Haacke installed on the facade of the Teatro Sociale and at former San Francesco Church (Cultural Space Antonio Ratti).
The exhibition is an opportunity not only to tell the life and story of a visionary entrepreneur, but also to further the idea he sought and supported of the dissemination and sharing of cultural values.
"Knowledge of the past generates new ideas and creates new forms of beauty," Antonio Ratti once stated, highlighting that experience and knowledge, art and experimentation are fundamental tools to understand one's time and generate innovation.
Image credits for this post
1. Villa Olmo, Como, Italy
2 and 3. Silks from the 1700s, Antonio Ratti Foundation Collection, "Antonio's Dream", Installation view, Photo credits: Agostino Osio
4 and 5. Drawings and sketches, Antonio Ratti Foundation Collection, "Antonio's Dream", Installation view, Photo credits: Agostino Osio
6. Brocaded damask, 1733 – 1737, Italy
7. Warp-printed taffeta (chiné), 1765 – 1775, Lyon, France
8. Brocaded damask, 1700s, Italy
9. Brocaded lampas, 1713 – 1718, Lyon, France
10 – 14. Drawings for tie motifs, painting on paper, 1934 – 1939
15. Drawings and sketches, Antonio Ratti Foundation Collection, "Antonio's Dream", Installation view, Photo credits: Agostino Osio
16. Drawing, pencil on graph paper
17. Drawing, tempera on cardboard, 24/4/1950
18. Drawing, tempera and ink on cardboard, 14/5/1949
19. Preparatory sketch, painting on paper
20. Preparatory sketch, painting on paper
21. Drawings for tie motifs, painting on paper, 1934 – 1939
22. Paisley scarfs, Antonio Ratti Foundation Collection, "Antonio's Dream", Installation view, Photo credits: Agostino Osio
23. Giulio Paolini, Double truth, 2021, Antonio Ratti Foundation Collection, "Antonio's Dream", Installation view, Photo credits: Agostino Osio
24. Jimmie Durham, Untitled (Apecar), 2004
25. Alfredo Jaar, The Aesthetics of Resistance, 2005 video