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The Lancia
centenary is a crucial appointment for the famous
car-maker. For the Turin-based company, the Lancia Tour
Italian Design project is an opportunity to underline
the excellence embodied by the Lancia brand. A two-fold
opportunity which is both a celebration of the past
century and a projection into the future where Lancia
intends to be a leading player.
At the basis of the project is Lancia’s desire to draw
attention to the styling and quality that are at the
heart of the Lancia project. For this reason, the
concept of the itinerant event chose to highlight the
link with one of the glories of the Italian
manufacturing system: the culture of design. It was a
decision that clearly expresses the desire to follow the
events of Lancia history, which has always been a
leading player in the evolution of styling and
technology applied to the car. But it also means
highlighting Italian excellence and therefore focusing
attention on the cultural system of the country which
has founded its international credibility on the culture
of the beautiful and the efficient.
To this precise guideline we must add the desire,
transformed into the concept of this event, to develop
the culture of design applied to the car further,
transcending the traditional academic interpretation of
industrial design, and associating it with the idea of
Italian lifestyle, that complex milieu of tangible and
intangible values that permeate the cultural and
manufacturing profile of Italy.
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They are aesthetic,
design, technological and manufacturing values which
combine in a unique mix to produce objects and ideas
that all have a strong symbolic and imaginary content.
Objects and ideas which have played an archetypical role
in many cases in the history of Italian design, in the
construction of a styling model, and which have shown
that styling can combine with practicality and
technological innovation in a wide range of fields, from
fashion to food, furniture and the automotive industry.
In terms of the project, the itinerant Lancia Tour
Italian Design exhibition has borrowed the theme of
distensio animi that was so dear to St. Augustine; it is
represented metaphorically here by the soul of Lancia,
which is perfectly able to convey the sense of one
hundred years lived intensely. Augustine’s theme of time
as memory and vision is transfigured in the display, in
the construction of the diachronic-historical
perspective which is expressed through the
identification of two main areas of the exhibition: the
area of memory, a video-installation created by Prof.
Gian Piero Brunetta, which evokes Lancia cars in their
relation with history and society in the past century,
and the area of vision, in which the evocation of Lancia
design is associated with the inventive material and
symbolic progress of design in the last one hundred
years. In this space, the experience of this immersion
in ephemeral architecture, the extraordinary harmony of
the shapes of the cars and the cultural proposal put
forward by the design exhibition, transform the Lancia
project into a unique lifestyle.
Davide Rampello
Davide
Rampello is Chairman of the Milan Triennial, lecturer in
Image Promotion and Communication at the Cattolica
University and IULM of Milan, artistic director of
events for the Palermo City Council. Former director,
curator of numerous exhibitions at the Venice Biennial,
the Rome Modern Art Gallery and Palazzo dei Diamanti in
Ferrara, and artistic director of the Venice Carnival
and the Festino di Santa Rosalia in Palermo.
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