Milan Design Week kicks off next Tuesday.
While the Salone del Mobile will showcase more mainstream projects, some of them made in collaboration with famous fashion houses and brands, the Fuorisalone and the Ventura Lambrate events promise to be more entertaining for all those visitors interested in discovering new projects by cutting edge independent designers.
As inspiration to all the people who will visit such events and to all the designers following the posts on this site, I’m republishing today the English translation of “The Alchimia Manifesto” by Alessandro Mendini.
Created by Mendini and Adriana Guerriero in the mid-‘70s, the Alchimia group represented the avant-garde of Italian design and created experimental handcrafted or industrial pieces, setting the stage for what would later be the Memphis Milano group.
The Alchimia Manifesto still has a few lessons to teach (check out the part about "despecialisation") not just to interior designers, but to everybody interested in the creative arts.
The Alchimia Manifesto
For the Alchimia group the act itself of “drawing” is what counts today. To draw, meaning the act of making signs, is not to “design”, nor to “project”: it is instead a free and continuous expression of thought, made visual. A “motivated” movement.
As a group which produces drawings Alchimia interprets its task to be that of furnishing others with a proof of “sentimental thought”. The motivation of the work lies not in its practical efficiency, the “beauty” of the object is in the love and magic with which it is suggested in its soul. Alchimia believes that today both man and woman live in a turbulent and unbalanced state, their lives characterised by “detail”: organisational, human, industrial, political, cultural fragments...A transitional period in which they are gripped by an undefined fear resulting from the loss of many values once considered absolute. To find oneself again is essential, and Alchimia works on those values which are considered negative: on weakness, on emptiness, absence of being and depth, which today take a back seat to that which is on the surface, full, and violent, as things to be removed. If the transitory nature of these times does not allow for certainty, if even philosophy seems to have shut its doors on the future, if it is impossible to visualise general and rational transformation, then the Alchimia group concentrates on itself, seeking out details of thought, intent only in signalling its poetical vocation.
Its act of introversion, its minimal creative will, is accomplished beyond the reach of judgement.
This is Alchimia’s “new morality”.
Alchimia is not interested in disciplines when these are considered according to their own rules. It is more important to explore those great empty spaces between them.
For Alchimia one must not set out to do sculpture, architecture, painting, applied arts, theatre, or what else. The project works ambiguously outside of itself, in a state of waste, of disciplinary, dimensional, and conceptual indifference: the project is only an exercise for drawing.
Alchimia believes that memory and tradition are important. But the new drawing is free from rhetorical ghosts, frozen and decanted by Alchimia in a formal and kaleidoscopic style.
Alchimia believes in despecialisation: “confused” methods of creation and production can live side by side; crafts, industry, informatics, new and obsolete techniques and materials.
Alchimia believes in the concept of “variation”. Given the insufficiency of drawing when facing the world, the drawing itself becomes a continuuum, without beginning, nor end, without gratification. Linguistic and behavioural games interwind, combine and repeat themselves infinitely in the two dimensional and three dimensional image of the object drawn, in a system of ordered disorder, valid only “within itself”. The visual aspect overcomes its cultural heritage and goes beyond its motivation, the valued image is purified, frozen, and “removed” from the artist’s anthropological and ritual weight. Fantasy’s aimless wandering constructs a representational mechanism in man’s eternal compulsion to incessantly redraw the image of this world and its ornamental origins, which Alchimia takes possession of.
Alchimia views objects as being both “normal” and “abnormal”. Their ordinary side makes them part of everyday life, of reality, and of the need for anonimity while their extraordinary side removes them towards the need for the unexpected, the accidental, difference and transgression.
Alchimia sees the drawing as a cycle: everything that will be has already been, and individual imagination, the basis for the world’s survival, can travel in every way through all cultures and places so long as it works like one in love.
Alchimia believes that a project is a delicate thing which does not impose its presence but approaches and gently accompanies those who love it in their trip through life and death.
Alessandro Mendini, 1985
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