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DESIGN WEEK 2024: Sarpi/Chinatown - Monumentale
Not to be missed events
During Milano Design Week, a city district becomes an entire project, and focuses on the culture of collaboration and integration.
With the debut of Zona Sarpi, the Sarpi Chinatown - Monumentale district, as it is now known, further enhances its vibrant multicultural identity for Milano Design Week 2024 with three major hubs: via Paolo Sarpi with the Chinese Cultural Centre, animated by local operators together with the Chinese community, the renown ADI Museum, and, last but not least, the Fabbrica del Vapore, which becomes a protagonist with its extensive schedule of exhibitions, talks and DJ sets. Here's everything not to be missed in the area.
The designers, companies and institutions, that together constitute the vibrant hybrid community that defines Sarpi Chinatown, showcase the quality of Chinese design and lifestyle, in dialogue with the Milanese and international scenario.
Via Paolo Sarpi and the Chinese Cultural centre are the epicentre of ZONA SARPI, which makes its debut on the occasion of Milano Design Week 2024. A huge temporary installation created by DONTSTOP Architettura, in collaboration with creative Tommaso Lanciani and the street artist Pao, is the China Town Portal that is all set to welcome visitors. It will embrace Milanese stylistic features together with a Chinese aesthetic by highlighting the imagination of the local children.
Via Paolo Sarpi will be enlivened by site-specific projects and decorative street graphics following a ‘food design’ theme, along with urban design prototypes and experiments created by independent designers who will exhibit their works in the windows of clubs and shops, and in the public street space.
The Chinese Cultural centre will host various workshops such as that by the RO.UP group, which will propose an installation and workshops on the theme of reusing clothing.
Other events, exhibitions and debates on the ZONA SARPI schedule will involve ADI, Fabbrica del Vapore, where the Changes, Know Now China exhibition will be hosted, with a selection of projects promoted by Chinese cities and design weeks, LOM Locanda Officina Monumentale, the Luisa Delle Piane Gallery, designer Francesco Faccin’s studio and the Sozzani Foundation.
The dialogue between East and West also continues within the ADI Design Museum which, for Milano Design Week, becomes a platform for events, meetings and installations, designed to delve deeper into the world of contemporary design also through its historical roots.
One of the main initiatives is the Origins of simplicity. 20 Visions of Japanese Design exhibition (until June 9th), a transversal overview of design and craftsmanship from the Land of the Rising Sun in order to understand the origins of the very concept of simplicity, which can be interpreted as emptiness (ku), space or silence (ma), sometimes readable as poverty (wabi) and consumption linked to use over time (sabi), and on other occasions as asymmetry, non-definition and imperfection.
On display are over 150 works, mostly unseen in Italy, designed by the most representative names of modern and contemporary design, some of whom have written the history of Japanese design since the Sixties along with exponents from later generations.
Universities, design schools, collectives and independent designers all gather at Fabbrica del Vapore this year, creating an extensive and vibrant line-up of 15 exhibitions dedicated to design, digital art, debates and installations.
Two flagship exhibitions. Futuro Anteriore (Future Perfect) CASVA Cabinet of Design Thinking, an exhibition of the best utopias preserved in the CASVA collections, an archive of 20th-century design and architecture: past, present and future intertwine according to the needs and challenges of the present.
And the Ugo La Pietra. Abitare è essere ognuno a casa propria (Living is being at home everywhere), a personal exhibition that testifies to the Italian designer and architect’s ability to decode, and comprehend, the contradictions and constraints of our urbanized society, in order to achieve the habitability of collective spaces.
Not to be missed is UpTo - fino a che punto ci si può spingere (how far can one go), an exhibition that celebrates female creativity through 21 ‘outsized’ projects, some of ‘titanic’ proportions, others infinitely miniscule: an invitation to overcome conventions, to embrace innovation and new creative possibilities.
Whilst, at Spazio Messina, within the theme of Interdependence, the Polytechnic of Milan Design department brings together a series of projects created by students from over 50 design schools worldwide: the exhibition explores the interconnected nature of the elements - people, things, nature - within systems, societies and relationships.
The exhibition schedule is accompanied by a music festival featuring some of the most interesting names on the national and international electronic scene. Sama Abdulhadi, Francesco Del Garda, Lele Sacchi, Alex Neri, Rollover, Le Cannibale, Fabio Monesi, just to name a few of the protagonists who will alternate at the console.
The DJ sets will set the Fabbrica del Vapore Piazzale alight against a backdrop of a futuristic scenography from the afternoon until midnight, followed by club nights in the Tempio del Futuro Perduto space.
