MOSTRA VINTAGE

“VINTAGE SHOW”

 Exhibition promoted by

Sant’Elia Foundation

edited by

Ninni Arcuri

Loggiato San Bartolomeo – Palermo 

Opening January 6, 2014

until 15 June 2014

T he first impact immediately leaves its mark: the homage to Ducati and its 1970 Scrambler, a leap back almost half a century, introduces this journey down memory lane through industrial design, the objects in our homes, “primordial” of the years between the first and second half of the 20th century.

VINTAGE makes its debut at the Loggiato San Bartolomeo in the renewed setting arranged on the three floors of the exhibition area by Ninni Arcuri, collector and performer, who once again presents – after being a guest of Palazzo Sant’Elia and Palazzo Ziino – his story of a era, the one enclosed between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 80s, whose timbre influenced costume, fashion, design and technological development of the following decades. The Ducati brand is present with two other gems, testimony to the history of a company that has made design its genetic code: on one side, a 1948 cine-projector (a period of industrial reconversion after the stop imposed on the Italian war industry which also involved the engine manufacturers), on the other, that concentration of technology on two wheels represented by the Panigale 899 which hides a very high performance “jewel” under its elegant fairing. The exhibition develops along a path in which communication plays a significant role. The ground floor houses an original wall-mounted newspaper library dedicated to the DIVA/WOMAN relationship in the engaged and popular periodical press of the 60s and 70s, a sort of mural reportage on the first stirrings of the feminist movement and on 1968 declined in all its forms. A path that, in respect of the chronology, is transformed into the testimony of the nascent consumer society already along the stairs that lead to the upper floors. The advertising signs, in tin or luminous, they remind us how the art of persuasion and induction to consumption has known a much less invasive and equally effective era. And in terms of advertising and mass media, a retrospective on CAROSELLO, its slogans still relevant today, its testimonials, its stories, cannot be missing. Obviously in black and white, broadcast in a SMALL TV CORNER where dozens of televisions also tell the evolutionary story of the most famous household appliance in the world. Consulting – but with extreme care – vintage newspapers and comics is possible in the READING ROOM, an ideal bridge between the first and second floors, a space in which the exhibition accentuates its pop character. We begin with the TELEPHONE WALL dedicated to domestic telephone models which finds its perfect “closure” in the public booth of the 70s; it continues with the DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENTS which tell the rooms of the houses of the economic boom through commonly used objects; it closes with THE DESIGN ROOM in which the material comes back to life through the reworking proposals of a real Factory that re-creates objects from warehouse waste.

The CONCEPTUAL ARMCHAIRS and the CHOCOLATE MATTRESS are the pieces that best describe this original reuse operation. And all this surrounded by jukeboxes, pinball machines, vintage motorcycles – don’t miss the long-distance duel between Motomorini and Guzzi from 1960 – bar counters, 70s psychedelic-style lounges, radios from every decade, magazines (see the first number of 1968 of the Domenica del Corriere directed by Guglielmo Zucconi recently exhibited at the Spazio Oberdan in Milan in the exhibition dedicated to the Beatles). And speaking of the Beatles, the reference to the music of those years could not be missing. THE SCALE OF SOUND recalls records and turntables while the sound diffusion guarantees each room its most appropriate soundtrack