NoveBotteghe

Material Convergences

The exhibition project conceived by gumdesign aims to showcase the reality of the "Renaissance workshop" in both everyday and contemporary contexts. It explores the interactions and cross-pollinations of design languages, tradition, and innovation. An "artisan workshop" that considers both the physical dimension—made of people, machinery, tools, "dust and sweat," and updated with a technological and contemporary approach—and the narrative space where matter is transfigured into emotions, where fragments of experience, form, and space are composed and decomposed.

Living by opening oneself to beautiful and important things, to their care, and to a sensibility that implies greater responsibility and ethics towards the environment. Living in the "world of the possible," between physical dimension and imagination, in search of an arrival at beauty.

A cultural and entrepreneurial project that presents itself in the everyday, described in its uniqueness and randomness, with unexpected variables and in the totality of emotions and experiences. NoveBotteghe is the second stage of a series of exhibitions designed for Milano Home, capable of renewing itself in number and content to become a fixed and unmissable event, equipped with variables—the number of "workshops" and their content—that will make the visitor's experience unique and unrepeatable.

The exhibition project for Milano Home / Fiera Milano stems from a reflection that began in 2014 with the cultural—later transformed into entrepreneurial—event of La Casa di Pietra (The Stone House); an independent project that has managed to build a personal and unique territorial encyclopedia that tells of know-how, territory, and artisan sensibilities throughout Italy. Approximately 50 artisans and businesses form the backbone of this narrative project, coming from all Italian regions and bringing with them the founding ingredients of small, medium, and large enterprises.

Matter, digital technology, and artisan sensibility merge to obtain unique, personal, and unrepeatable results that are proposed internationally; there are approximately 300 objects from La Casa di Pietra, ready to tell the story of "beautiful Italian design." A selection of these collections will be exhibited in NoveBotteghe and will tell of that contact between designer and artisan, between tradition and innovation, which are the "engine" of new Italian entrepreneurship.

In NoveBotteghe, we will find a representation of the realities just described; there will be 9 artisans and companies who will tell their story, their production, and their dreams through matter and its processing, the technique and the applied creativity that often solves complex production issues. Cusenza Marmi will be present, which in Valderice works the local stone with rare manual and digital skill, restores Sicilian Baroque, and proposes precious stone inlays; Greencorks, which in Sandrigo has generated a true virtuous circuit of circular economy for the recovery and reuse of cork, capable of applying the material to innovative and useful proposals for the designer; Intrecci Toscani, which in the Pisan countryside has established its weaving workshop, collects the tops of olive branches pruned by farmers and gives them new life with wonderful creations; Pimar, a Puglian excellence that works Lecce stone with rare sensibility, creates precious architectures and interiors worldwide and supports internationally renowned designers with products capable of telling the story of the territory; Stefano Parrini, a master of leather who from the Tuscan Mugello projects himself into the world with typical artifacts, made entirely by hand with great artisan skill, and collaborates with universities and designers to carry the ancient art of saddlery and leather processing; Marmoservice, an exceptional company from Brescia that has important collaborations with Italian and foreign companies, capable of solving important problems in the production of objects and construction details; Prefabios, a company from Caggiano that produces concrete artifacts with particular sensibility and is experimenting with photocatalytic concrete artifacts; Leonardo Gianì, a Campanian sculptor who moves from traditional to contemporary work with a particular interpretive sense; Art Frigò, a Veronese reality that transforms books into lamps through an immediate and readable communication of the most famous covers.

Between the artisans present in NoveBotteghe and La Casa di Pietra, there is an essential, strong, and natural bond that has been able to create a community in which they work, contaminate materials, experiment with matter, and research new processes.

The theme of contamination gives rise to a close collaboration between gumdesign and Pimar Srl, an Italian excellence based in the province of Lecce: a new challenge that uses the methodological process of La Casa di Pietra, now applied to new collections in Lecce stone, carparo, and recovered olive wood.

A central display in the NoveBotteghe area, simple and highlighting the raw material and the processes, and does not generate waste materials; the dimensions of the stones and the lack of processing waste, the olive wood recovered from olive trees affected by Xylella—an invisible bacterium that leads to destruction but that stimulates in its "non-tangible" nature a reversal of course and vision by man—determine a virtuous cycle where sustainability and attention to materials are now necessary and essential elements. The designer plays a decisive role, identifies the resources and uses them carefully and respectfully; the company enthusiastically shares the method and pushes it towards new paths to follow. A close and important meeting that directs economies towards sensitive trajectories, towards a planet that requires more and more attention.

A true cultural project oriented towards business to move constructive and operational energy in the territory.