SOTTSASS

DETAILS

Name: TD6/MOVE: The Game is (never) over
Location: Milan, Italy
Year: 2013
Typology: Exhibition
Surface:
SL: 36 sqm
Curator:Pierluigi Nicolin
Client: Triennale di Milano

The game is (never) over is the installation designed by Scandurra Studio Architettura for the 6th edition of the Design Museum Triennale ‘The Influence Syndrome’. Walls covered with overlapping reproductions of the Kamasutra and botanical treatises fill the space: in the centre, a slot machine mixes and reveals, one by one, the constellation of references from Ettore Sottsass’s work. A machine whose movement is only apparently random and which, in its continuous, unpredictable combinations, superimposes the sacred and the profane, the ordinary and the extraordinary. The transfiguration of the sacred leads to a domestic landscape made up of technically reproducible objects, shapes and figures that traditionally occupy specific and non-transferable places. Sottsass translates archetypal and archaic forms into an urban and everyday background, elevating the banal object to the status of a totem.

A stratification of images, combinations that are never taken for granted and never predictable, are incessantly reproduced, saturating the environment and upsetting the established order. Sottsass’s operation is interpreted in this way, entrusting the game with the serious task of circumventing the system, invading the private sphere and ambiguously touching the bedroom. As in an exorcism against death, playful and vital forms take on archetypal connotations: thanks to the transfigurative gesture, from Duchamp’s pissoir to Warhol’s Brillo box, Sottsass’s repertoire is self-supporting, generating continuous and unprecedented combinations.