Tribute to ‘Inventario’ (Inventory) 12th anniversary
 

Tribute to ‘Inventario’ (Inventory) 12th anniversary

April 2017
 

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neo~local design

 

Conceived and directed by Beppe Finessi, ‘Inventario’ magazine is an indispensable tool for thinking about design beyond its disciplinary’s borders, and getting some orientation in a world where ‘everything is design’.

 
 

An excerpt from the magazine’s original 2012 manifesto states: ‘We believe that one can find method and rigor (two keywords in design) in anything: an object… a piece of art… a building, of course, but also in preparing food, organizing a journey, writing a novel’. Two years after the Inventario magazine and ‘editorial project’ was awarded with the Compasso d’oro.

Every issue takes the shape of an unusual monography, devoted to objects capable of evoking or gestures sharing ways of thinking – the eleventh issue is about ‘shaping air’, the fifth ‘soccer ball’, the last ‘the shape of feathers’.
Among its many merits, ‘Inventario presents a plurality of voices and points of view, and aims at promoting a dialogue between different design disciplines: architecture, photography and art, as well as design itself. Of course the architecture one finds in ‘Inventario is not that of the glossy pages of coffee table magazines, and maybe still refers to a past when builders and architects worked together. Here is discussed a photography that explores the pervasiveness of photography itself; or are exposed art forms that investigate our relationship with places. Opening critical thoughts that design really needs.

By stating that ‘every gesture, even the simplest, is an act of design’, this useful magazine helps us overcoming at once the rigid oppositions between art and design, tradition and innovation, last minute technology and a nostalgia for the antique. By doing so ‘Inventario’ insinuates that the world of design (our world) is complex. And that for this very reason it may be more urgent to attempt to decode rather than to reorder, and more useful to give shape to directories of samples focusing on design practices that may lead us to definitions that still have to be discovered.

 

editorial board

Nicolò Ceccarelli - Marco Sironi

 
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