CRAFTSMANSHIP - TRANSCRIPT
If you want to go back to the renaissance, you have a bottega, you know. The famous painters, artists, they used to have a bottega where young people used to go to learn how to work directly with the master. So when I see students interested with passion. I always suggest go and learn the history. Because if you don't know where we come from, we don't know where to go.
Visual design is a craft. It is both an intellectual practice and then a very physical practice. To be compared or to think of Italian heritage, in terms of how art and design, is often intimidating. But I think that it is part of us. It is something that even if i am not aware of it influences me.
The evolution you know … which is not revolution, but evolution what I like, as a concept. If you learn how to design a typeface, this changes your mentality. And this done all by hand with paper. This in some way is very helpful for a designer. To know the material, working with paper or sketching. It makes me more involved in the project, in the process of a project, and that for me is craftsmanship.
Typography is where the craftsmanship still exist, and still is there because even if we are in 100% digital era, there are still certain aspects that are absolutely, that require craftsmanship. Because when it comes to type design in typography, most than any other visual activity, is where details make all the difference.
Italy was born with bottega with workshops and so on. All of them were in competition with each other, so the only way to emerge was to finding something new, something special, something that nobody did before. And I think that this shaped our way to approach to the production world.
I think craftsmanship in Italy has always have a strong role in the development of technologies and design and fine arts. The strange thing is that Italy never got to be really an industrial country.
An architect as Gio Ponti was or Fornasetti for example was a very strong personality, with strong identities which creates the basis for a collaboration with craftsman and after such kind of collaboration became the basis for the design of the 50's.
I think that this work makes possible to have several copies of an object. and make these things affordable, and this is part of my approach. There is something ancient and noble in this gestures that are made in the industries . I really fight hard to make this messages take shape in the object. Messages to me must be spread around if you believe in them.
Designers should work both with physical and digital. It’s harder for us than Michelangelo maybe. He was not asked to take care about what will happen after I make my statue, and what happens before I make my statue. Well the only difference is that our stone doesn't exist because it is digital and it can evolve every-time you want. So it’s so strictly connected to craftsmanship.
And again, if you don't know what happened before, you cannot really know if you're doing something new or if you're interpreting something already existing and all those kind of things I mean. It's all craftsmanship in a way. Not only because of the manual activity, but also for the mindset you need in order to - so the craftsmanship is more in your head more than in your hands.
What made incredible and fantastic the history of the italian design is this way of making things. By having this artisans capacity, this incredible people that were just saying let’s try to designers. So maybe this "let’s try" is the most important thing of our artisans that I will keep for the future.