Year: 2024
From 3 to 7 June 2024 the former Angelo Gavazzi soap factory, where our lab has been for more than ten years, hosted the Italian edition of R.E.A.C.H., a European programme that looks at how enterprise works in art and culture. Around thirty musicians and visual artists, from France, the Basque Country and the United States, came with their mentors and spent a week working together among our machines.
For the occasion we reopened the old tool shop, the disused building opposite the lab and one of the largest in the complex, and set it up as the residency’s common house: a place to work, discuss and show pieces conceived for that space, including Bar Paesaggio by Giacomo Grippa and Chiara Biraghi and the Tapchan. The architecture of the soap factory, with its industrial history, was the first material of the week.
The Milan symposium was devoted to visual arts and design. We offered participants our way of working, in which digital fabrication machines are a means of thinking through design, and asked them to look for a language as collective as possible. After the speculative design workshop by Paco Design Collaborative, the artists used the lab’s materials to build the models and the set for the closing night. The talk, moderated by Marco Bocola, brought together Stefano Gilardino, Marco Monaci, Simone Frulio and Roberto Dragonetti; the week ended with a party and a DJ set.
Credits. R.E.A.C.H. programme, Erasmus+. Partners: Combustible, Musika Bulegoa, Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, Vectorealism. Mentors: Nick Sansano, Errol Kolosine, JD Samson. Speculative design workshop: Paco Design Collaborative. Talk: Stefano Gilardino, Marco Monaci, Simone Frulio, Drago (Roberto Dragonetti), moderated by Marco Bocola. Press: MEI, Meeting degli Indipendenti.