Alessandro Mendini, mobile infinito, 1981. PROJECT WITh ALCHIMIA AND VARIOUS AUTHORS. PHOTO: C. LAVATORI
by Daniela Lotta
In September 1981, in the courtyard of the School of Architecture in Milan, Alessandro Mendini, together with Studio Alchimia and the experimental theater company Magazzini Criminali, held a performance on an infinite sequence of furnishing objects—from chairs to bookshelves, from closets to beds— added one after the other according to a non-modular, open, and flexible flow. Taking shape before the eyes of the audience was theatrical furniture that unfolded in space by means of an endless succession of deliberately dissonant and differing elements, made by a motley group of artists.
Alessandro Mendini, Mobile Infinito, 1981. Groninger Museum COLLECTION
An endless piece of furniture. Actually, a Mobile infinito, Infinite Furniture: “The project of many, or rather, the non-project of many key figures,”Mendini specifies; in fact, as is customary for him, he scattered the designers’ authorship in a network of relationships whose main associations are represented by some of the most influential artists, designers, and architects of those years—where, alongside masters like Ponti, Munari, Sottsass, there are also the youngest exponents of the Transavanguardia and the nascent Neomodern design movement.
A “weak” and unpredictable structure, a lively catalogue of types and decorations conceived from what Mendini defines as “cultural dust,” or rather, that kaleidoscope of forms, signs, and memories in which we are constantly immersed. A flow of information, a throbbing and immaterial flickering of pixels, which instantly flares up the rationalist illusion of a programmed, mono-logical, and mono-material society. A joyous and colorful virus spreading like electronic chicken pox that entirely covers Mendini’s Poltrona di Proust, or like the infinite polka dots by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, multiplied in space to break up the simplified artificial color-phobic landscape of modernist ideology.
Yayoi Kusama, Dots Obsession, – Day. Installation view at Akasaka Sacas, Tokyo, 2008. Yayoi Kusama
Image courtesy Yayoi Kusma Studio Inc.