On the occasion of Salone del Mobile 2021, Six Milano Galleria will exhibit a significant portion of the project Mezzoterra Mezzomare by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Juan Sandoval from next Saturday to Friday 10th September. The two artists transformed the chair ‘laleggera’, designed by Riccardo Blumer for Alias, into a border place between land and sea, between art and design. The same dialogue that animates the research and selection of design works and vintage pieces proposed by Six Milano Galleria, directed by Aurélie Wannenes. In the 2007 work, which emphasises the message of dispersion and communication implicit in the sea as a crossroads of peoples, each chair is identical to the other, as a product of industrial design. The artistic intervention, however, transforms it into an individual, unique object which, together with the others, outlines a sea. Just like people. A work that combines art, design and social engagement in an invitation to sit down and discuss different cultural visions and open a reflection, a communication with each other. To mark the uniqueness of each piece, a sticker has been applied under each seat with the signature of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Juan E. Sandoval, and the indication of the position of the chair in reference to the sea it belongs to. The two installations exhibited at Six Milano Galleria – curated by architect Andrea Sanguineti – have a different structure and represent two seas: the western part of the Baltic Sea, which washes the shores of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany, overlooked by Copenhagen, Malmo and Oslo; and the Caribbean Sea, the Mexican coast that ends in Cancun.
“For a long time Michelangelo Pistoletto has been working on the richness of differences, – reads the dedicated press note – at the heart of his poetics is the sea, a place of cultural diversity par excellence, which invites us to reflect on the concrete possibility of integrating differences while respecting them, telling about encounters between civilisations, of growing in respect of differences, of wanting to sit down and look at each other to discover how much we are both alike and different. In Mezzoterra Mezzomare, the attention is catalysed by ‘laleggera’, the archetype of the contemporary chair. Its formal purity symbolises intense expressiveness̀ and at the same time represents an ideal neutral surface for an original work. An icon, which in Pistoletto’s imagination evokes a dream. A chair that is perhaps also a rock, halfway between the beach and the sea, where each of us can sit, play with our feet in the water and look into the distance, in search of the other and of a dialogue with who is far away, different but the same”. The staging of the exhibition allows an overall view of the two installations: the chairs ‘laleggera’, juxtaposed to one other in a continuous theory and in a natural disorder, maintain their individuality while offering a jagged and lively vision of these stretches of sea and the coasts they lap.
“Love Difference is a name, a slogan, a declaration of aims. The movement combines the universality of art with the idea of political transnationality, and focuses on the Mediterranean in that it mirrors the problems of global society, – writes Michelangelo Pistoletto in the Love Difference Manifesto from 2002 – on one hand the difference between ethnic groups, religions and cultures is the cause of terrible conflicts; on the other, the supremacy of powers, which is leading to uniformity and the erasure of differences, has led to a dramatic situation (…) Uniformity and difference are the two opposing terms that represent the maximum conflicting tension in the current world situation. A politics which leads people to ‘love differences’ is vital for the development of new prospects throughout the social domain”.
