But for the first VIP Art Fair’s edition you don’t need to book a ticket, an hotel or to move from home as for once the appointment is online.

The virtual space already hosted art events or exhibitions, but it´ s  the first time that this happens for a fair. With 138 galleries from 30 countries exhibiting into three levels of prestige “exhibition hall” the first edition of VIP Art Fair has already managed to establish itself as a “must”. It´ s amazing: a virtual exhibition space takes the physical place of Regent’s Park or Lingotto!

As in all art fairs, visitors and collectors can converse with each dealer, but in this case the opportunity to contact people by phone or by chat with Skype makes it more accessible, faster and spontaneous.

This contemporary way to attend an art fair let you approach works as it has never been possible before in the real world, flatting the differences between a collector and a simple curious, facilitating interviews and the exchange of information like market movements, rates or artists’ s biographies.

You can try this personal experience and maybe do some shopping, day and night until January 30th. Check it out: www.vipartfair.com.

The theme of this issue will be  conversations, relationships, conviviality…  whether inside our homes or beyond. And what is one of the most delightful situations for creating smart conversation? At the table of course… When we eat, preferably over some good food…

The students of Domus Academy will work as a group to figure out what this topic means to them, and create the artwork for this issue of Illywords.  We launched the workshop there with about 70 students  from all over the world, especially from Asia, but also from Europe. They will organize themselves into team-work groups who have a common brief from which to start, but individual tasks, topics, and results.

The guest star of this first meeting was Roberta Corradin, the very popular food writer, who gave fascinating examples of Late-Roman era literature about conviviality (we are still trying to convince her to write about that on this blog!). She mentions this quote from Brillat- Savarin, the great French Gourmet, which is a perfect starting point:

Among the pleasures of food and the table in the middle, of course, there’s the pleasure of conversation.

Here are some photos of the first encounter at Domus… stay tuned to find out how the students interpret this topic.

Albert Einstein’s contention was that God doesn’t throw dices. It was shortly after he made this famous statement that Juan Mirò was happily painting sky-scapes with constellations of randomly arranged astral bodies without any centre or fringe, scattered about over the canvas in unrestrained, jubilant disorder. Dices were most definitely thrown by John Cage to compose his music and paint pictures. He let himself be guided by the results of chance and data processing operations based on the I Ching oracle – ancient traditions of the Far East against modern-day science, the conscience of the nonconscience of life versus Western rationality.
It wasn’t long before the topic of the alternating ebb and flow of chance and necessity worked its way into scientific debate, leading to discoveries that disprove Einstein’s contention. A small platoon of physicists, including Bohr, Plank, and Heisenberg set out to inquire deeply into the make up of matter, taking it apart until it became clear that at the heart of it all chance and hence the imponderable do indeed play a large role. What’s more, Stephen Jay Gould, a great populariser in the field of the biological sciences, has explained that the belief of man as being at the apex of the pyramid of life is quite groundless. If the parameter is the capacity for multiplication and expansion, then bacteria most definitely take first prize, while if it’s longevity as a species, there’s no beating that of turtles.
To Greek philosophers “order” and the “universe” were one and the same. To our modern minds the world is essentially a chaotic place. It is indeed a popular opinion, even though only a limited number of thinkers are truly familiar with the discoveries and arguments of modern-day science that support this view. Somehow though it is a commonly held view. Perhaps it is an awareness born of the fact that the stead-fast cause-effect relationships that were believed to govern the universe ever since Aristotle and then on down the centuries through to Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton no longer seem to hold.
The helter-skelter of technological innovations and the rate at which the changes they wrought have occurred have been such as to tear asunder long-standing norms and customs by which people were content to live out their lives by. Be it the way wheat is farmed or a wedding celebrated, rules that have stood the test of time for centuries have suddenly turned irrelevant.
But the mind, and not only the human one at that, craves for a pattern. The model of universal beauty common also to animals and essential for biological reproduction is strongly rooted in the idea of symmetry, which is indeed symptomatic of bodily health and fitness. The eye that scrutinizes its surroundings strives to make sense of what it sees by structuring its field of vision, by distinguishing what’s central from what’s peripheral, figure from field, what calls for attention, especially for reasons of survival, from what can be safely overlooked.
The curved universe of modernday physics as it is conceived by the contemporary mind is essentially hubless, a circumstance that gives rise to paradoxical effects that artists, as usual, have been quick to perceive and render in effective imagery and visual metaphors.
Mark Tobey’s and Jackson Pollock’s all-over painting style subverts prospective and wholly deprives the painting of any internal order, a powerful metaphor of the lose of any anchoring point. Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concepts are like lacework on the canvas, a jubilant celebration of sky-borne freedom, of all that which is new and unrestrained, of a challenging disorder to ponder over and respond to. Monochromatic paintings in all their variants and renditions, from Malevic’s white rectangle to Yves Klein’s deep blue backgrounds, underscore the concept of emptiness, an emptiness that can be perceived as a pattern only in so far as it is content-free.
But disorder does not suit man. When confronted with it individuals can even take refuge in obsessive, compulsive, and repetitive behaviour patterns in an attempt to reinstate order, regardless of how, to put things back into their proper place, even if there isn’t any. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to brood over a problem until we don’t come up with the solution, or even when we can’t find a solution, because instead of setting it aside or deciding to face up to it we let ourselves be overwhelmed by it.
Contemporary art is rife with formulae and equations, numbers and encoded signs like nervous tics. Over the last thirty years, Hanna Darboven, for instance, has been depicting tangles of rational sums imbued with a perverse and repetitive logic. Roman Opalka’s paintings are littered with progressive numbers set against a white background. Painted in
increasingly paler shades of grey, it’s as if they were marking the passing of time, waiting to fade out completely with old age so as to let death bestow upon them a sense of
finality, of accomplishment. On Kawara has mailed cards to addresses across the globe with only one statement written on them: “I am still alive”. In this way he hopes to leave a sign of his passing through life, plotting its itinerary by counting the places along the way and marking the passing of time. In his early works Tony Cragg attempted to reshape items of coloured plastic junk. His works are now in marble, bronze, and alabaster, but he still talks of the sculptor’s task in terms of bringing out the hidden order that lies buried deep within matter. And yet how can one forget his enormous piece of modular sculpture made up of cubes exhibited at the 1997 edition of the Biennale in Venice and meant as a tribute to the precarious, unenduring status of any given form?
Alighiero Boetti has devoted almost all his work to the relationship between order and disorder. In a book and two large wall-hangings he attempts to rank the thousand longest rivers in world, proving what an impossible task it indeed is, as measurements in nature are far from permanent and can differ widely depending on the source.
Boetti’s works in any case point to a possible way for coming to terms with uncertainty – striving for order in our times entails above all being willing to acknowledge and accept disorder.
It means no longer striving for something absolute outside ourselves but seeking our own centre of gravity within ourselves.
Rather than yearning and searching for fixed rules by which to guide and govern our lives, we must learn to enact “the rule of self-rule”.
What’s essential in following one’s individual calling is to be coherent with one’s self. The proper, universal, as-it-should-be order of things is a belief for those who will have a faith. All the others are left to cope with chaos, the unpredictability of the future, and chance. But far from being the source of life’s blunders these aspects are indeed what make life possible in the first place, and what give it the essential impetus and energy to continue renewing itself.

Here are 5 thoughts on being (let’s call it) an innovageur:
1. Don’t give the Gods cause.
2. Touch.
3. Revel in it, surf chaos and love it!
4. Live your best life every day.
5. Turn Blue.

1. Don’t give the Gods cause.
The Gods first make bored those whom they wish to destroy, as one vintage Italian said many years ago. I’m a big fan of what Francis Ford Coppola would call spontaneous recklessness. In simple terms, this “is going for it”, clutching your messenger bag under your arm and hurling yourself off the edge. It doesn’t matter what your station in life is, there’s no benefit in standing still. Murray Moss, who runs New York’s best design store, gets it. Moss (now open in Los Angeles) blurs the lines between museum, gallery and retail. Bon Innovage!

2. Touch.
Brands that become Lovemarks are restless through their constancy. Look at Fiat, returning to glory through reinvention of its roots with Fiat 500 (I just bought one for my vintage Lakelands cottage in Grasmere). As we loop back and forth through time, the magic ingredient is touch. An idea is only an idea when it touches someone. This is what innovation means, to change the world around us. Innovation delivers a quintuple bottom line: profit, share, preference, sustainability and involvement, all based around consumer experience. Chanel perfume is pure Innovage in a bottle; that’s why it sells for a super premium. In a sub-conscious second, a scent on the breeze can bring the past into the present and open portals into the future.

3. Revel in it, surf chaos and love it!
Anyone unlucky enough to be called a brand manager knows how tough it is to stand out and how easy it is to go under. It’s sheer bloody chaos out there because consumers have all the power now. And you can only thrive in chaos if you love it. Whether you’re vintage or modern, the way to win is roll up your sleeves, wade in, get closer to consumers and be super-responsive. Learn to fail fast, learn fast, and fix fast. Apple introduced flops like the Newton and Pipin long before the iPod and iPhone. As we from the lands down under sometimes say, “get amongst it!”

4. Live your best life every day.
Some vintages are so ripe for innovation, they need a revolution. This interminable business of work / life balance is one of them. Work should never prevent you from having a life. It should enhance your life. By integrating work into life, living can be one constant flow of joy. I have three “flow” questions for any person or fashion or wine that claims to be “vintage”.
1. What do you want to be doing in 5 years?
2. When are you at your best?
3. What will you never do?

5. Turn Blue.
The days of sustainability as a green idea are over. There’s a new color in town, and it’s eternal.
a. Green is about the earth; blue adds the depth of ocean and sky.
b. Green is about limitations, blue is about possibilities.
c. Green is about fear; blue is about radical optimism.
d. Green is about obligations; blue is about opportunity.
e. Green is about problems. Blue is about passions, people saying: “I want to sustain this Blue Planet, and I can do something.”

Innovage feels right to me, reflections on the past that move forward and grow. “Ah…”, says Bob Dylan, “but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Chefs are keen at the idea of vintage decanted from the bottle to the dish. Keeping dishes that have made a House’s cooking history always on the menu brings forth memories and tells the gastronomic-conscious world the story of who one is.

In an interview of over ten years ago a renowned Catalan chef earnestly entertains the idea of opening a number of restaurants each promoting one of his vintage menus to prevent the record of his culinary inventiveness fading away from one year to the next.

Not a bad idea at all. Just think if you could follow the progress of your favourite chef or dish in fifteen meals over fifteen years. It’s a bit like falling in love with an artist and her works and wanting to find out more about them and what they were like in the past, tracing them back to her first hesitant steps. As much as this sort of quest may be undertaken for artists thanks to all sorts of records available in museums, book, film and music libraries, and so on, tracking down a chef’s culinary delights and masterpieces isn’t quite as easy. What guides, recipe collections, critical reviews and the like there may be are scattered and far too scanty to satisfy the foodlover’s curiosity let alone her taste buds.

Opening a millésimé restaurant calls for a culinary Broadway-like location. That’s not an irrelevant paragon; patrons in fact come from all over the world to see blockbuster performances on Broadway, and thanks to this inexhaustible global catchment area a show can be billed for years. Admittedly, for most chefs a millésimé restaurant rarely goes beyond a dream, but vintage dishes put in their appearance on many an inspired menu.

Since 1998 Moreno Cedroni at La Madonnina del Pescatore in Senigallia on the Adriatic Coast of Italy specially provides for a vintage dish on the menu. Why? “I find specifying the year I invented that dish helps to mark my progress. It’s like when one reads a book. It helps the reader to better savour and appreciate what he’s reading if he knows when the book was written, whether early in the writer’s career or later, when the writer had reached full maturity”. In other words, the vintage dish grows with its creator. The Senigallia-style brodetto (fish stew) has come a long way since its inception in 1984. It is in fact one of the oldest dishes on La Madonnina del Pescatore’s menu. As much as it may still owe its distinctive flavour to that final sprinkling of vinegar, the way the different varieties of fish that go into the brodetto are cooked has changed, and that makes a difference.

There’s no denying a vintage dish has sentimental value for its creator, and that’s reason enough to want to consistently keep it on the menu. It may in fact be that that particular dish won its creator acclaim and fame through the specialised media, as in the case of Ciccio Sultano, master of hob, oven and everything else in between at the Duomo in Ragusa Ibla, Sicily. It may even be that since 2001 new and increasingly refined and subtle gourmet-friendly nuances have come to enrich the culinary performances at the Duomo in Ragusa, but Sultano can’t forget that the D.O.P. (appellation grade) Ragusano cheese tortino (pie) “was where it all started for me”.

Other times there are dishes that have made gastronomic history or at least attained celebrity status. The undressed raviolo (dumpling) or the risotto (stewed rice) served with gold leaf topping by Gualtiero Marchesi, superstar chef and proprietor of Albereta at Erbusco sul Naviglio in Northern Italy, still deserve and get authorial photos and rave reviews, and even make the front cover of glossy magazines.

There’s a very straight and narrow path along which the great hallmark dish, the vintage creation, may walk as a proud statement of culinary identity, deviating from which it can turn into an irksome, ball-and-chain staple seriously stifling a chef’s inventive flare and desire to travel down new avenues of self-expression. That’s something Fulvio Pierangelini of Il Gambero Rosso fame at San Vincenzo on the Tuscan coast in Italy can all too sadly vouch for. His personal culinary nadir was his greatest success and biggest favourite, namely sauté king-prawns on a bed of chickpea puree. Following on over exposure by the media in 1986, there was hardly a patron who wouldn’t order the dish. Like a jammed cog, at the height of its popularity the vintage dish had debased its creator to the role of self-emulator.

Under such conditions, a chef can turn against his creation. Torn between love and loathing, he destroys, deletes, indeed shakes off the shackles of his culinary inventive hang-up. And then he can start freshly and freely inventing again.

But time heals all wounds, and at a ladies’ luncheon especially organised for over sixtyfivers living in the quaint Tuscan sea-side resort, Pierangelini felt confident and in control enough to revive the famous dish for his two-hundred women guests. Once again, as in the beginning, a standing ovation. A stirring experience, for the chef but also for the ladies, for many of whom the legendary sauté king-prawns on a bed of chickpea puree was a first-timer.

There’s a type of restauranteuring that seems to shun creative cooking and is coy at innovating the menu. The vintage menu harkening back to the restaurant’s heyday is more or less consciously felt to be a safe, unassailable haven in such eateries and as such is made to bravely stand the test of time unchanged. It confers the place a solid identity, even though not much more than a drawing-board-drafted one. “Never change a winning team”, as the saying goes, may be rendered in the culinary context as: “never change a winning menu”.

At least one illustrious example of such a trend comes to mind. Nobu has been rigorously serving the same menu ever since 1994. It started out in New York, the gastronomic Broadway wonderland. Seeing its blockbusting success the culinary show then hit the road and in a short time fifteen branches had sprung up across four continents. To seek, discover and enjoy have given way to staid reproduction. Instead of inventing new menus the ticket seems to be that of opening up more and more new Nobus around the world.

What applies to a winning team also applies to a menu, and what’s more who needs evolution when we have cloning! Fair enough, food-lovers seeking an artful and creative cuisine may cringe at such a policy statement but business is business and what’s good for business…

When any dish in any cuisine can boast being vintage it proudly witnesses to the cuisine’s gastronomic achievements. It’s a dish with a story to tell, the story of its inventor, and at the same time a token of what she or he was like at a given point in time. Sure enough, it’s the hub and hinge of personal and professional culinary identity. But it can easily grow too top-heavy, tilt the wrong way and drag its bearers down. Identities that manage to avoid such a pitfall and which are the ones we prefer are those that may be said to be “in progress”. What makes bearers of such identities especially appealing is their openness and broadmindedness. Such attitudes are born of unceasing self-inquiry, for they never stop questioning who and what they were; who and what they are; who and what they may be. In the world of gastronomic inventiveness they’re the sort of individuals who know how to fully conjugate the verb “to cook”, drawing from it their present and reaching out for the future.

Never before have we been so rich and wealthy as today. “We” here stands for a small part of the world population living in Europe, North America and some other parts of the globe. Depending on our definition of “rich” and “poor” it could be said that some ten percent of the world’s “materially rich” suffer terribly from a strange disease that first appeared and was labelled in the USA as “option paralysis”. The positive side of the “malady” is that ninety percent of humankind is unaffected by it.
The sad side is that at the other end of the economic spectrum the “no-option-at-all” group is also growing.

Option paralysis occurs whenever there are so many alternatives to pick and choose from that any choice turns into a dire quandary, giving rise to a sort of behavioural inertia. Sixty-seven different types of yoghurt were put out on the shelf in a food-store but demand faltered. The assortment was cut down to fifteen and the sales volume of the reference yoghurt started growing again.
A visit to a toy shop with a sevenyear old can be eye opening.
Given the freedom to choose whatever pleases her/him the child will quite often be stuck for a decision. During the war a friend in Belgrade sent her thirteen-year old daughter out of the country to Belgium. The girl decided to buy herself a pair of shoes. In but a single afternoon my daughter, our guest and I visited more footwear outlets than what I would normally
do in a year. After hunting for the shoes all day she didn’t find what she was looking for. I couldn’t help commenting to her how a city with empty stores and one whose stores are chock-full of goods can end up having the same effect on the consumer.

Some restaurants, that I call smart, do offer a reduced menu. Some shops seem to have made a small selection for the customer, thus limiting “multiple” to “double” or “triple” choice. Colette, for instance, store in Paris that only carries and displays a very small number of articles of the same kind.
Their selection criterion is “good design”. The (mostly wealthy) customer with little shopping time is sure to find the best lamp, the funniest clothes, and the finest tableware, while the ultimate Nike’s are just three tables away. The owner of a bookstore once complained to me that he was at an utter loss as to what books to buy.
“Editors just print too many books; I simply can’t cope with the selection anymore, and neither can my customers”, he moaned.

Moral: one wouldn’t be far off the mark in predicting that over the next decade designers will be devoting part of their time and energy not so much to diversifying but to cutting down on available options. In order to bring some order (and decency) into the world of material commodities and consumption designers will have to drive the message home to manufacturers that also on the shelf … “less can be more”.

What does it mean today to speak about “marketing plans”?
Communication plans are based mainly on advertising, on the careful arrangement of exhibition spaces, on leading articles and on events. In particular, leading articles present the company’s views through the journalist who is the person enjoying great credibility on behalf of the readers.
Events, on the other hand, are characterised by an innovative aspect because they are a form of direct contact with the actual consumer (who comes into contact with a novelty item) or with the potential consumer (who might, thanks to the event itself, fall in love with the product). Events can express the company’s soul in a profound and direct way, through an occasion that is not only commercial but also cultural.

What roles will the companies of the future have to play? Commodity suppliers or those who project values?
Products can no longer rely only on their material appearance because the value of a commodity is increasingly less embodied in the material with which the product was manufactured, tending instead to be crystallised in ethical elements. Ethicality is a fundamental chromosome in every company’s DNA, but it shouldn’t materialise solely in the form of a given instrumental asset. Performing ethical actions is mandatory, advertising them is not indispensable.
The Swarovski family, for instance, has always viewed ethics as one of its fundamental values; indeed, already back in the Twenties, the company had envisaged the possibility for its employees to purchase their homes by means of long-term no interest mortgage plans and, most important of all, without any obligation to stay with the company. To those who accused Swarovski of trusting its employees too much, the company replied that “the more a person feels confident in terms of economic and human satisfaction, the less he/she will feel the need to quit his/her job”. A great precursor of times, no doubt.

Some companies try to detach themselves from their specific product in order to share a world of values with their consumers; to what extent can Swarovski afford to be detached from crystal? Is it a matter of acquiring legitimacy in other fields?
In our view, crystal is a raw material but, mostly, it is a means to convey emotions. It can become an object embodying functional aspects but, when struck by a sunray, its facets will capture it, refracting it in the colours of the rainbow. In this case it bypasses its functional aspect to arouse positive feelings. It is difficult for us to detach ourselves from crystal because crystal is in itself a significance which, if properly declined, generates significance which reflect the joy of life, emotions and beauty in a vision which becomes similar to poetry.
Its beauty is of a democratic type, based on a philosophy whereby it is incarnated in the form of a right that belongs to humanity, as part of life’s values, and not as a privilege reserved for the very few.
Swarovski products are exclusive but at the same time they are available in great quantities on the market, to generate profit not only in terms of mere economic returns but also in terms of a greater widespread of social and cultural enrichment.

GAS: The quality of our products is the result of a multi-secular manufacturing tradition, where natural raw materials are skilfully shaped by expert hands. Here lies the secret and the fascination of the Venini furnace in Murano which, since 1921, has always amazed those who have been fortunate enough to visit it and to grasp its spirit.

What is the notion of uniqueness in the Venini production?
RIZ: The best way to understand this notion is through the example of a customer who demands our shop to deliver precisely the article that he has held in his hands, even when it is a limited production or series.

GAS: Even though our catalogues depict the same products that are on sale, every single artefact is similar to the other but never identical; especially if you look carefully at the shapes, you will find differences in terms of hues and surface finishing. This is the real essence of craftsmanship.

There are few types of items, but endless interpretations by major artists. How do you recognise a Venini item?
GAS: Every collection is bound together by its ability to generate a final synthesis, even though it is the result of designs and interpretations belonging to different artists. Finding the best match between Innovation and Continuity is probably the most thrilling part of my daily work.

How does passion remain alive over the years and in the people who have worked for Venini?
RIZ: It is a funny disease, highly contagious, difficult to explain or understand, affecting not only refined collectors or the most experienced glassworkers at the furnace. Personally, I believe that the secret lies in the ability to understand what lies behind the product which, apparently, looks like nothing more than an object made of blown glass.

GAS: By actively involving everyone in our projects, from the famous designer to the young shop assistant in the showroom: through their enthusiasm, everyone can and must give his/her own different but indispensable contribution to the product.

Is there a limit beyond which quality is wasted?
GAS: Quality is wasted when it is mere decoration.

Is luxury that which crosses the limit?
RIZ: Let me start by saying that the word Luxury – perhaps excessively debated in the recent griffe-permeated years – badly fits into the Venini environment which perhaps has more to do with the world of what are known as high range products, a definition which I believe is more appropriate to our production. In any case, I do not believe that the notion of Luxury entails crossing a limit, be it an aesthetic, price range or imagerelated limit. However, it is worth pointing out Coco Chanel’s statement: “… luxury is not the opposite of misery but rather the opposite of vulgarity…”.

GAS: I, too, believe that in the case of Venini, luxury has to do with a cultural notion and that it is never meant as mere ostentation of wealth.

RIZ: Given the complex sociological implications that characterise the consumption of luxury items, it is important to distinguish between the consumption fetishism that affects fashion victims and the motivations that drive those who are fond of or collect our products; the latter, I believe, seek some sort of spiritual fulfilment every time they buy or enjoy an item such as a Venini artefact.

GAS: Venini’s customers have always paid great attention to – and at times in a critical way – every stylistic change taking place in our company, as well as to the projects the company develops, especially in the case of limited collections and unique works of art created in collaboration with international artists.

Venini products are very expensive items. What does the price of an item represent?
RIZ: The price of our items is the sum of many factors ranging from costly production factors to quality selection criteria, from stylistic research to traditional craftsmanship, from acknowledged artistic prestige to aesthetic elegance. Let me remind you that our “CAD/CAM systems” are actually traditional medieval tools handled by skilled glassworkers who have been handing down this trade from one generation to the next…
Unfortunately, few persons bear this in mind, but it is our duty to try to point out these differences as much as possible compared to the other quite respectable glass artefacts that are available on the market.

It is with slight consternation that one enters Haim Steinbach’s studio. On the identical baby shoes, stuffed owls and yet more masks, carnival prostheses, bells, dolls, cans and boxes of washing powder decorated with commercial graphic designs, fake skulls, containers with unquestionably phallus-shaped handles. A collection of kitsch items, as it were, and yet, at a closer look, that’s not what it is: Steinbach is attracted neither by bad taste nor by common taste. It is the world of objects, shapes, languages through which one speaks without uttering.
As a matter of fact, sometimes he even likes words: YO!, for instance, the slang-like greeting kids exchange in the streets. Or the slogans used in advertising and the new entries in current jargon, idioms raised to the status of objects in our minds: preconstructed vehicles into which we project our identity and by means of which we like to communicate it.
It is also more or less the same thing happening with wallpaper, one of the first elements Steinbach employed to speak to the public: layers of flowery paper which must have touched upon someone’s emotional chords, which families or ladies adopted as outfits for their homes and as a way of connecting to the world.
For this reason, taking a walk in Steinbach’s company is one of the funniest experiences you could ever have: he looks at everything. He stops in front of every single shop window. He is intrigued by a case. In another shop, he studies the cut of a shirt as intently as a tailor wishing to copy it. He analyses the way in which famous brands launch their latest products. He judges advertising campaigns, accepts to be seduced by them, only to move away with an ironic comment that is always there, as is proper for a Jewish New Yorker.
What does he do with this heap of objects which he owns but also only looks at? He normally puts them on shelves. He chooses them according to their shapes and types of relations (in any case, never venture with him into a discussion about the reasons underlying any work: he will cram it with a form of intellectualism which is not naturally his and he knows it). When he cannot place an object on a shelf, because it is a poster or wallpaper, then he will stick it to the wall; if it is women, as in 1996 when he was choreographer for Strenesse’s fashion show, he will make them glide down a runway under a beating rhythm of pouring showers.
In every case, he will always raise what he is exhibiting both as an object and metaphorically. Indeed, he will exalt it, isolating it from its context and proposing it to us as an object deserving attention and not merely an object to be used or idly looked at. He will place the object within a composition that is governed by visual rules of its own but also by operational rules: no object is ever fixed onto a stand, even when the distance required between the objects is accurately measured out. The public may hold what it sees, move it, break it. It may do anything, as long as it looks at it.
As a rule and in his most famous works, Steinbach displays the fruit of his collecting habit, like junk-men on accurately-crafted wooden shelves that a carpenter manufactured for him. They all have the same hanging angle even though they are different in size. They are varnished in one or two colours with maniac precision. After all, equally maniacal is also the booklet containing the assembly instructions one has to follow after removing them from their boxes which are even more beautiful than the objects themselves. The pamphlet reads as follows: point one, wash your hands with soap. Point two, don a pair of white cotton gloves. Point three, make sure you have a firm grip on the object to avoid dropping it while removing it from its box. And so on for at least fifty pages.
The shelves may also be made of glass, supported by Innocenti metal pipes (an unexpectedly elegant combination), or they can be in the form of a proper wardrobe with outfits on hangers inside.
Invited to participate in Kassel’s Documenta in 1992, Steinbach enhanced the round turreted shelf on which he had arranged objects taken from director Jan Hoet’s office – also a collector – by hiding it behind an enormous wooden panel: the visitor’s gaze could penetrate only through a window and the feeling of becoming a voyeur was enough to enhance what you saw, mixed objects which otherwise would have appeared meaningless. At another exhibition in Gent, in 2000, he filled the music school building with metal protrusions: the final result was that the building looked like a surreal, polyphonic organ, while the gas vent pipes, used as flues, looked like a constellation of silvery organ-pipes.
Nothing is meaningless, that’s the whole issue. Every shape we place around us, especially in the whirl of producing objects, images, shapes, characterises the Western world. But never have objects been meaningless: indeed, in an old installation in Naples at the Lia Rumma gallery, Steinbach included various archaeological items. On another occasion, he invented a casing for art jewellery, as if to deny that he is driven solely by the taste for mass culture.
You need to remember more than one of his works, to become familiar with his way of arranging real objects by bestowing upon them a new identity, to witness the calm but strict scenes he puts up to demand the uniform varnishing of a frame, the only proper way to frame a photograph. Only then can we reflect upon the limit between that which lies on his floor in Brooklyn and the reason for its lying there, waiting for an idea of composition and the occasion of an exhibition to retrieve something from the deposit. Everything in there looks sinister, even the newspaper clippings of a banal slogan: waiting for a car to take us back to Manhattan, we feel like we’ve just been at a fetishist’s place. But when we come across those same objects at an exhibition, we realise that they are part of an epic poem: like only few other works of art do, they tell us how much objects speak for us and about the secret code binding them: the desire, memory, pulsation, impulse, history flowing through the days.
This sentence would make him smile and would remain unwritten: Steinbach would mock himself and also us, for we are willing to believe in such things. But then, thinking back to his far from easy life, from his childhood in Tel Aviv to his arrival in the United States, from his difficult self-made career (which not all Americans have experienced) to his success which came quite late, only after the Neo-Expressionist fashion was over, thinking back to his soon sixty years of life and to the pride of having been a master of objectsculpture; then, perhaps, just before correcting us with a sagacious comment, his gaze would curl into mild gratification.

Inspired by the lively and changing atmosphere of Place Djemaa El-Fna in Marrakech, it is a space in perpetual motion, its mobility responding first and foremost to the desires of artists. An evolving work site where nothing is definitive, neither the place nor the exhibitions. A mouldable and flexible structure adjusting to the everyone’s lifestyle. A place you can take possession of for an hour, a day, or forever. A lively organism, the Palais de Tokyo discloses its strength and weakness, its beauty and wounds. A place that is true to life, in the image of today’s and yesterday’s art. A transit area, a thoroughfare. Exhibitions are prepared and dismantled openly, with work areas kept constantly in view, not in the aim of turning work into a performance, but in the aim of bringing the public nearer to the art of its time.

One summer evening seven years ago, in one of Mantova’s most charming squares, Festivaletteratura was born.
That evening, the eight of us (those who later set up the organising committee) informed the town about our plan.
A dream plan that we had been studying and comparing for a long time and that we had redesigned to link it to our town.
An extraordinary town, a location that is perfectly suited to welcome whoever wishes to listen, see and think.
A town that, in the past, was able to produce culture, research and experimentation in its squares and buildings, just as we wanted for it to do
today.
That evening, people came in great numbers (much to our surprise), they listened to us and shared our idea: 4 days dedicated to literature that were rich in meetings with writers and artists speaking directly to an audience who wanted to listen to them in the many extraordinary corners in town, creating a highly favourable and uniting atmosphere.
A common bet shared and rooted among the thousands of fellow citizens working with us as volunteers, as sponsors, supporting us by offering hospitality in their homes, welcoming the authors, and by doing so much more… or, more simply, by being a friendly audience.
The writers and artists, from the more famous ones to the younger ones, also soon agreed to our plan, probably enticed by our stories and especially by those of the many friends helping us right from the start.
Enthusiasm has the ability of being contagious and this is the only reason that can explain the formidable network of contacts, common experiences and work that immediately came into being.
Along with us, hundreds of volunteers very slowly started believing in this festival and joined in to plan it in a festive atmosphere.
Simply, ruling out all distances and formalities, organisers-volunteersaudience- authors-the town followed our lead, instilling life (and they still do) into this festival that, according to what many say, is shrouded in “inexplicable magic”.
The wish of many – perhaps not always assessed and understood – to know, meet, be involved, came true here, where the Festivaletteratura tried – and still does – to offer stimuli to each individual’s curiosity. For six years now, the town has been pleasantly and peacefully invaded by a careful audience that is loyal to its yearly September appointment.
For the past six years, September in Mantova has been a different one, almost as if time were suspended in an ideal location (everybody’s town), where the very many events allow to build up personal and pondered experiences next to the hectic desire to see and listen to something different, something new (unknown) that is shared with others. Festivaletteratura is an “other time” for me too (and for all of us), a different time, almost stolen from the habitual time of our everyday life, a time used to work at a common plan through fun (and trying not to take ourselves too seriously).

VOLUNTEERS ARE THE VITAL LYMPH FROM WHICH THE FESTIVALETTERATURA IN MANTOVA DRAWS ENERGY. THEY ARE YOUNG PEOPLE COMING FROM VARIOUS PARTS OF THE WORLD TO OFFER THEIR HELP IN ORGANIZING THE FESTIVAL DAYS. THEIR CONTRIBUTION IS ENTHUSIASM, GOOD WILL, POSITIVENESS. IN RETURN THEY RECEIVE A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE. HERE ARE A FEW PERSONAL STATEMENTS BY THEM.

Patrizia Longo, Genoa:
“In waiting rooms one flicks through magazines almost without reading them but sometimes a page chooses you. Festival d’Italia: why not? It’s always nice to go on a brief holiday! It was back in 1997 and the adventure was starting in Mantova. That year I was nothing more than a curious visitor mesmerized by the unusual atmosphere. A very mild climate and splendid architecture embraced the Festival where international authors and common people, street artists and students, scientists and journalists were being drawn closer together. Among all these people, one can easily spot young boys and girls in their blue T-shirts, they’re very busy, loaded with bundles and packs, tired, sometimes they are unyielding but always polite and smiling: they are the volunteers. For the past five years I’ve been recovering the girl that is asleep in me: I slip my blue Tshirt on, hang my pass around my neck and treat myself to that magical event.
Quite often, I end up skipping meals and tiring my legs out to fulfil all the many chores but it is difficult not to respond to the intellectual stimuli I draw from all of this and which, during the rest of the year, I am often surprised to see blooming in my artistic activity.”

Benedetta Zecchini, Mantova:
“Festival volunteer: a volunteer and her camera. It was the 1998 edition of the Festivaletteratura, I’d been working as a photographer for 4 years, someone contacted me: would you like to take pictures of the authors in town during the festival days? So I’m there, with a group of other photographers who undoubtedly outdo me in terms of experience; we sort out the meetings, the job doesn’t seem to be difficult, but I’m nervous, I’m responsible for taking pictures at the children’s events and at several theater performances: it’s difficult to get the right light and to keep out of the way, I try blend into the environment. It’s fun and I manage to snap pictures that I like, so I do it again, 1999, 2000, a break, and again today, 2002. The job is more complicated now, as the festival itself has grown bigger, but also thanks to this experience, my way of being a photographer has changed: in the past, I used to enjoy looking for shapes and objects but now I find different images, I can broaden my search to include people, the people in a space, I try to grasp happy and lighthearted faces, funny or grave expressions, sentiments, sensations, not only mere shapes.”

Saniye Yilmaz, Germania:
“Being a small part of the festival, better still, being at the festival was already the most I could ask from this experience. I have never seen a whole town so involved in the materialization of an idea, working with enthusiasm for the success of the festival, so full of energy in those few days. Every step I made took me to places already imbued with history and becoming once again the background for new historical events. Indeed, the meeting with Mario Vargas Llosa was an historical one – at least for the simple reader. And, I’m sure there will be many other meetings that will be remembered in this way by readers like myself. I can’t wait to renew this experience.”

The spirit of creative battles are lost to the side of the safe and the dull we shouldn’t forget the power of creative ideas to drive the world forward.

Artists and designers in partnership with visionary clients improve and enrich our lives.
Can you teach people to have great ideas? You can create a situation of possibility, opportunity and challenge.

Experimentation and innovation come from these environments where daring dreaming is encouraged and wild ideas can be expressed with confidence. It is the job of Art School to create this environment, coupled with teaching about great innovators of the past.
Buckminster Fuller, a design hero to both art students and military wrote: “You have about ten minutes to act an idea before it receeds back into dreamland”.

Act before those ten minutes elapse – just think it up, then do it!

By listening to her dual nature, she achieved a rare ability to invent mental “micro-climates”, opportunities to avoid the here and now and enter the “forever”. However, a listening, thinking mind should not aspire to the noisy confusion of large events but should introduce small ideas. These ideas then generate transformations, tiny but active, nourished by that special form of attention: “making yourself available, like paper”.

There is nothing heroic about it: “see small, hear small and think small”, she writes on those pages typed between 1952 and 1964. Even today, in her book The other rooms (2009), she invites us to listen to shadows: “People need shadows in order to rest. I’d like you to send a bunch of shadows to a friend”. Silent shadows which could be the faces of people loved and lost, but also the shadows created by the sun in a room, which become three-dimensional before our eyes and therefore a welcoming space filled with emptiness created especially for us, a space we can fill with our bodies or thoughts.

Listening to birdsong means understanding what the emptiness of the sky contains: life. Ono’s short film Outro consists of a single image coming in and out of focus. It shows Ono, Sean as a young boy, and John Lennon in a garden, a family appearing and disappearing. It is already in a void, or no longer exists, but the game of disappearing images is guided by the constant presence of the birds.

John Cage, her lifelong friend, also dedicated one of his most famous pieces to birds. The same birds who represent the sound of the skies and also of emptiness, and which represent the soundtrack of silence. We all know what idea Cage had of silence, as he even tried looking for it inside an anechoic chamber and was forced to accept that in the absence of any sound, we hear at the very least the blood flowing through our veins and the beating of the heart. Silence, the music consisting of a rest sign written on a fiveline stave, is nothing more than another anthem to listening, to the noise of the heart, the noise of emptiness, the fullness of meaning we can achieve even when there are no more words. We should mention at this point that Japan, a significant influence on both Yoko Ono and Cage, is a universe in which the kind of silence aimed at listening to the rustling of a falling leaf is much more highly regarded than it is in the West. In this fluctuating world every moment comes and goes, and it is worth remembering this even by just concentrating on the noise that consumes it.

We should remember that ancient practice brought back in vogue by Yoko Ono: the wish tree. It can be an olive tree, a maple or even a simple wooden panel bedecked with handwritten notes declaring our wishes. The artist arrives and gathers them all up, as with the Wish Tree at the 2003 Biennale, makes a small bonfire and delivers them up to the dustbowl of the world. Burning them is not intended to be an offence, but a way of perpetrating our wishes. We, who expressed these desires, have another powerful ritual at our disposal to help us achieve them: not magic, but listening. By writing down what we want, by hanging up that note, we have had to focus on an emotion, a future prospect. Nothing, other than understanding, re-reading and listening to our desire, can help us realise it. Yoko is not a witch, she is an elderly fairy, who now has the wisdom to help us listen to what we feel.

In support of my belief, this is exactly what happens in our company. illycaffè is based on three things: quality, distant markets and the technology to serve the first two. The constant drive towards improvement and our strong inclination towards research and science mean that we have invented no fewer than three of the eight radical inventions that have marked the coffee industry over the past century: the modern version of the espresso, pressurised packs, and the first industrially-produced coffee pods. All “home made”. These have been accompanied (again in-house) by important process innovations, in particular the electronic sorting of defective coffee beans, and also new developments as regards the value chain. Here I am referring to our way of procuring raw materials. Our supply chain integrated upstream means that we are now the only coffee roaster who buys 100% of its green coffee directly from the growers themselves. In this way we can provide the growers with the know-how they need to achieve high quality, which means we can pay them higher-than-market prices, in consideration of the excellent work they do. Even when it comes to communications, our best-known campaigns are a direct result of the creativity of people who work for us. In particular, I am referring to the designer espresso cups in the illy art collection, or the more recent Galleria illy project, presented in New York and Milan.

The culture of “doing things in-house” keeps the business going. Knowing how to express its skills in its own industry allows a company to base its corporate strategy on knowledge. Sharing knowledge encourages the creation of virtuous networks of partners, which nowadays is essential to speed up growth. People working within a company who have this approach find themselves in a stimulating environment with a multi-faceted culture and a business mentality which reaches all levels. An environment that creates trends and also sets them, instead of merely following other people’s ideas.

For a company, the past is never just the past. It is an opportunity for growth, driving it to explore new directions. Ducati, one of the most famous motorbike manufacturers in the world, has opened a museum at its premises in Borgo Panigale (BO), to utilise its own “home made” resources. Motorbikes, engines, photographs, and drawings tell a typically Italian story of people, experiences and innovations, some of which are still used as the basis for new designs. Marco Montemaggi, who created and set up the Ducati museum, tells us about the project.

Where did the idea for the Ducati museum come from?
In 1996, I was 26. The managing director of Ducati at the time, Federico Minoli, invited me to a race in which Ducati bikes were competing, and told me: «I’ll give you everything you need, but you’ve got six months to design a Ducati museum. Six months, not a day longer». I didn’t know where to start or who to ask, but thanks to a team which included Livio Lodi, now the museum’s director, the Ducati museum was ready six months later.

Why build a company museum?
Before the work started, Minoli explained to me that Ducati didn’t just want a museum in order to preserve its history. The Ducati museum was supposed to be a communications tool (for commercial benefits, marketing and image promotion), a trademark for the company, a way of preserving and using its own heritage and a way to form partnerships with other local businesses. With the bikes and the history of their racing successes, it was to convey the passion of an Italian company that often managed to keep its bikes and riders ahead of the rest, although its resources and means were far inferior to those of its rivals.

How can a company museum provide creative ideas that can solve the complex problems of the modern business world? In other words, how can the past teach us about the present?
As we collected material for the museum, scattered all over the world, we came across all kinds of records and artefacts: forgotten motorbikes and period photographs. We transferred them all to digital format and archived everything, and now the company can draw on well-organised materials that can be used for any application, such as the “Seventies” merchandising.
Not only that, but designers from all over the world visit the museum to study the old bikes and find inspiration. For example, the “Mike Hailwood Evolution”, a bike which evoked the unique model produced for the famous British rider, was designed by Pierre Terblanche based on the designs kept in the museum.
It is also a “living” museum, used for meetings, gatherings and public presentations, thanks to its helmet-shaped hall which seats up to 45 people.

How much do the company’s employees take an interest in the museum? Does it build team spirit?
The museum has merely reinforced the team spirit that has always distinguished people who work for Ducati. Even now, many visitors are former employees who bring their children and grandchildren to see motorbikes they spent their lives building. Many employees even visit the museum during their lunch breaks, or take their friends and family at the weekend.
This sense of belonging to a community has always been part of this company’s success, in racing and on the market. This is why Ducati wanted to thank its staff, past and present, by dedicating the “memory wall” to them – a huge photograph at the museum entrance dating from the 1930s, showing the entire workforce all together.

It’s really not all that surprising that so many new words are being thrown up every day. “The times they are a-changin’”, as the song goes, and in a really big way, be it in environmental, social, economic, or cultural terms. Perhaps all this name-spinning simply reflects the need we have to put new words to new realities so as to better come to grips with a changing world. Such is our urge to understand what’s going on about us that we sometimes rush ahead, coining a new word even before what it is meant to designate exists at all. Is this also the case for “innovage”? Does it refer to something that actually exists, or is it simply a fancy catchword? Does the word refer to a new economic reality, or merely to a vision of how things might be? Does it really help us to grasp the way the world is going?

It’s no mean question: naming an innovation profiles and focuses it, helping to bring it into the cultural mainstream. In what, for lack of a better definition of the postindustrial age we live in, is called “knowledge economy”, wealth is generated by ideas. A product’s value is determined by the life-style, information and meaning potential it incorporates. All that, plus memory. And of course, equally important for the product’s success is that all these contents be appreciated by consumers so that they may in turn be incorporated by them. The dynamics of any idea in fact depend on the relationship the individual or individuals who express it have with other individuals and how it links up with the ideas of these other individuals, who decree its success when they feel the idea akin or comparable to their own.
That’s why we may speak of an aesthetic and highly valuable relationship between objects that appear to reach out for the future and those that are loaded with a sense of the past, with the accumulated experiences of groups of individuals who identify with them.
But there’s more to it than that.

At least there is for anyone seriously committed to innovation. Vintage can undoubtedly be trendy. That is, it can be a sprinkling of something quaint and fashionable that makes for shortterm and short-lived added-value. If vintage were simply a comingback-into-fashion of a fossilised piece of history in the form, shape and style of objects of yesteryear, whatever may be deemed innovative about them upon their reappearance would last the short time span of a flimsy and fleeting fad and then fade away.
No, ideas cannot live and thrive on fashion alone. For something novel to be truly innovative it has to have far-reaching and durable cultural significance. Born as it is of the marriage of “vintage” and “innovation”, “innovage” may seem a bit of a faddish catchword. But it also conveys a deeper meaning in line with the times we are living in, namely the age of innovation. When thus considered, it suggests the sweeping structural changes we are undergoing in all fields, and at the same time how the past can help us cope with them. After all, the past and the future must at some point meet, and this could be a good reason for this neologism’s success.

Why? Because when a number of individuals are sold on a novelty and make it their own, thus decreeing its success, there are many interrelated factors at work; it’s not only a question of the message the object conveys as such, but also the source of the message; its credibility; its history; the sense of the future it embodies. If a firm puts out something new and original on the market, it must be careful to do so in an intelligible, credible and easily recognisable manner.

That’s essentially what a brand’s goodwill and hence value boils down to.

What’s expected of a firm when it launches a new idea is that it be convincing. A firm that proves to be thus reliable and trustworthy, improves its worth. Such credibility is born of a legacy of innovative ideas that have proven their worth because genuinely original, dependable, and steeped in authentic tradition. Whatever monetary value may be attached to such qualities and written up in the books, it’s but a pale reflection of their full and real value. There are indeed commodities whose value largely depends on these factors. Economists
in fact refer to them as “experiential commodities”, in so far as they’re esteemed for what they’re really worth only after consumption. If they’re consumed at all, it’s not because of any assigned value, but on the basis of past experience of the brand that has proven capable of fully delivering what it promises.

At the same time, a brand and the firm it represents to a large extent draw their credibility from the historical, geographical and cultural context out of which they have grown. The ecosystem of ideas that go to make up this context is a rich milieu and the firm’s historical background. Like any ecosystem, though, it is liable to pollution by stale and staid ideas and thoughts.
That’s why in an age where knowledge is a source of wealth, a firm should have as much concern for the quality of the cultural milieu in which it operates as for that of its products.

Any innovation is therefore as complex as its context makes it, which depends on a number of inseparably interwoven factors, including in what terms it is presented by its proponents; the relevance it has for others; the capacity its users have to make the most of it. Far from being a mere technological phenomenon, an innovation is more than ever a matter of culture, so that the narrative which surrounds it can be said to be no less important than its material contents, if indeed not more. A commodity that in addition to being new has a story to tell, the story of those who promote it and of where it comes from, and tells it in a sincere and comprehensible manner, stands a good chance of making the quantum leap to becoming a significant innovation and leaving its mark on society. Otherwise, it’s little more than noise piled up on more noise, of novelties whose scope stretches little beyond that of being passing fads.

Innovage then is a vision that makes for a synthesis. It expresses the desire to hold together the urgent need for renewal and the sense of such renewal. It’s the same process at work whenever there’s an innovative step forward, such as when the Bialetti Moka or Vespa were invented, two objects which have today risen to vintage status, acquiring a cultish appeal. As such, it’s a word that fits anything substantially durable yet formally changeable. It refers to that special moment in history when something fated to becoming an evergreen classic is born anew.

The digital era, with e-mails, pdf documents, e-books, and Internet, should have marked the end of printed paper, but it seems that we are moving in completely the opposite direction. We are printing more of everything. Is there an explanation?
There have been many theories about the effects of electronic data processing and the new means of communications. Some predicted the paperless office – the result however was exactly the opposite. People prefer to read from paper prints rather than from an electronic screen. Display technologies have not come close to the display properties of paper. The arrival of the Internet actually had a very positive effect on the number of magazines, especially in regards to special interest and computer related titles. All our forecasts predict an increase in the demand for paper in advertising and promotion. Paper has its place in the communication mix and is proven to be most effective when used in combination with other media. Our Life with Print programme provides valuable information about this and our Direct mail in the media mix book is a very useful resource in providing communication specialists with insights in this regard.

Is there an almost “fetishistic” link between the reader and printed material?
How can something that does not move be so moving? Paper is much more than just a means of communication. Paper touches not only our visual sense, it is the feel and the reproduction of quality images that attract us to paper. Paper is portable and can be enjoyed at any speed we prefer. Unlike most alternative media, it can also be creatively manipulated. Whether for attractive labels and packaging or glossy motor car brochures, exotic destination calendars and beautiful art books, paper is inherently desirable.

Does the equation paper=tree=deforestation still – unfortunately – apply today? Can you give us a snapshot of the situation at world level?
The equation “paper=tree=deforestation” is a very common misunderstanding of paper and its impacts. It does not apply in general and it never has. Forestry aims at sawn timber in the first place. Paper is mainly made from woodchips, a byproduct of sawn timber and logs from selective thinnings. However, there are plantations or forest farms that are designated for pulp production only. A snapshot is really not easy. The latest FAO World Forestry Report [ www.fao.org ] highlights that forest land is lost due to agricultural expansion. Positive, however, is that forest area is on the rise in developed and in some developing countries.
‘Clear-cuts’ for a short term gain with long term devastating ecologic and economic effects are clearly not acceptable whether aimed at agricultural expansion or timber, or both. We therefore exclusively source our wood fibre from suppliers with sustainable management practices.

What are the likely scenarios for the future: will we use less paper, will we be able to recycle much larger quantities, will there be new materials we can print on?
Paper recycling technologies have advanced significantly. The paper industry has substituted virgin fibre with recovered fibres substantially especially for cheap packaging and newsprint. This trend will continue.
Mineral and synthetic fibres are available, however, paper based on virgin vegetable fibres have superior properties, thus providing paper ideal for high quality image reproduction as we require for advertising and promotion. It is safe in its use, it is recyclable, even compostable and – less expensive. And not to forget, it is made from a fully renewable raw material.

What steps are Sappi taking to find a balance between production and sustainability?
We have our activities embedded in a comprehensive environmental management system that includes ISO 14001 [ www.dnv.com/certification/managementsystems/environment/ISO14001.asp ] and EMAS certification [ www.dnv.com/certification/managementsystems/environment/EMAS.asp ].
If you visit our paper mills you will find that we are able to produce paper in a highly efficient and environmentally friendly manner – optimised raw material, water and energy use and waste. 30% of our primary energy is renewable bio-fuel. Our most important fossil fuel is natural gas and we operate combined heat and power plants, the most efficient means of power conversion possible.
Time in forests is measured in generations not in quarterly reporting periods. At Sappi, we understand this and we know that the environment is key to our future. This commitment is constantly in our mind when we produce our papers.

Are venues and events like the Venice Biennale suitable for keeping up with the latest trends and developments in the art world and in general?
Art has always been tied to communication. With contemporary communication, can a genius be overlooked in some remote part of the world?

In Plato’s opinion art imitates reality and thus causes a rift with the essence of things, hence his disapproval. Do you see contemporary art as attempting to imitate the contemporary world?
No. Art has always pushed the boundaries of perception beyond contemporary life, art is not an illustration of contemporary life.

What work of art of the past do you reckon is still capable of strongly communicating its meaning to us today?
Artwork has survived because someone has pushed the plasticity of the picture plane or space into sculpture. Through the ages from prehistoric cave paintings, why is an artwork that is not personal still attractive?

The universe and the infinite: what can you tell us about these two concepts?
It’s difficult for us to visualise the concept of “the infinite”. And yet we are surrounded by many infinites. Numbers for instance. We can count from one to ten to a thousand to one million and so on infinitely.
Trying to conceive of space as having “n” dimensions is tougher, though. Conceiving of it as having four dimensions is already no easy task, let alone “n” dimensions! Human structure is tri-dimensional and this fact limits our powers of comprehension, hems in our knowledge domain.

What’s a limiting boundary that may be overcome?
In astrophysics we’ve come to understand that the matter that may be perceived by us when we observe the stars accounts for a mere five percent of the universe’s mass. We don’t know what the outstanding ninety-five percent may be given by.
We’re confident though that a theoretical abstraction will help us to understand what it’s all about in the near future.

Over the last century science has advanced far more than over the previous twenty or thirty centuries; can the same be said for man in general?
In the humanistic sphere there’s not been such a great leap forward. Humans with all their instincts have remained essentially unchanged, though overall man can be said to be more civilised now than in the past. One of the instincts that’s always been with us and that determines the way we look at the world is our sense of beauty.
It’s that complex set of perceptions that allows man to relate to a work of art, to an object in a special way. What may be deemed beautiful has changed again and again through history, but awareness of and responsiveness to beauty is intrinsic to our being; it’s our natural mode of approach to our surroundings.

What’s the discovery, you feel, that will completely rock our perception of reality?
Without a doubt the discovery of other planets similar to the Earth and hence with inhabitants like the Earth. The successor of the space telescope will bring a lot of things within our range of detection. To date, eighty new solar systems and a hundred planets beyond our solar system have been discovered at a distance of a hundred/two hundred and light years from us.
But our galaxy alone has a diameter of a hundred thousand light years and contains four hundred billion stars. If one considers that there are hundreds of known galaxies, the law of probability on such great numbers makes it highly likely that there’s a planet like ours somewhere out there. I’d say chances are so great that it’s close to being a certainty.

Is knowledge wealth?
It may be said that at present knowledge is concentrated in the hands of a few and this leads to a dictatorship of knowledge. Knowledge, I’m convinced, needs to be redistributed and transferred to developing countries, if nothing else even just from a utilitarian point of few, otherwise we’ll all be overwhelmed by the problems confronting them.
The International Research Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste awards grants and bursaries to students from developing countries also for the purpose of promoting knowledge redistribution.

What relationship is there between scientific research and enterprise?
In Italy there’s very little research that goes on in the corporate business sector. Illy with it’s Aromalab for investigating sensory perception is an exception, otherwise the general picture is dismal indeed.

What’s the reason: want of courage, short-sightedness, lack of an adequate cultural outlook?
Lack of culture that leads to short-sightedness that makes for lack of confidence. Focusing on immediate returns means doing the same thing over and over again. But sooner or later everyone else will be doing the same thing and for less so that we’ll end up not being competitive anyway. Research is upstream of any innovation. To forego expenditure in research leads to patents becoming obsolete, indeed now faster than ever before. Without on-going research our products and services are bound to quickly lose ground on the market.

Knowledge in the age of the net: what are your opinions on that?
The popularity of the net is currently largely due to its entertainment value. That’s not to say it can’t come in useful as a study aid, but I’m personally used to turning over pages and in the habit of biting my pencil when I sit down to study. The fact is that the web is an overwhelming source of information that just doesn’t allow time for decantation, reflection, or reasoned discussion. It’s like gazing at the starry sky without understanding anything of what one’s looking at. It may all be very spellbinding, but where’s the added value?

Is increasing specialisation, then, the only viable response to this massive onslaught of information?
Progress in some fields goes on at such a relentless pace that it’s difficult to keep abreast of it.
Even in my own field of astrophysics I can’t get through everything I want to, let alone the rest! It’s important to know
what ground others have covered in one’s field of study. But it’s an attitude that no longer seems to prevail. And that’s why there’s always someone who comes along and claims to have the umbrella.
Nowadays there’s no one who can be as eclectic as Pico della Mirandola or Leonardo anymore. They say the real specialist is an individual who knows everything about nothing.

What’s the way out of a this, then?
I’d say by promoting an extensive general knowledge that permits the development of an understanding for what goes on about us and a skill for screening information and sorting out what’s essential. It’s what endows an individual with sufficient mental flexibility to conceive different possible solutions even in one’s own field of study.

BARS ARE PLACES OF SIMPLE THINGS: WHAT DO YOU FIND STIMULATING IN BARS?
Human beings are creative beings but also social beings. They are productive in a playful sense. People seek that which is apparently useless, albeit maintaining the contrary. Therefore, meeting-places offer opportunities for lively relations, which are nothing other than situations of entertainment, in the sense of amusement, of the pleasure to do things that are free from our commitment to survival. We Italians have different types of relations with bars: sometimes it is the place for quick and fast enjoyment, the place where one can release the daily pressure built up by practical matters at any time.
There is nothing equal to the pleasure of entering a bar and having an espresso or cappuccino at the counter.
Everyone can relate to this but it can be different at the same time.

HOW MUCH IMPORTANCE DO YOU ATTACH TO TEAMWORK WHEN STARTING OFF AN ART PROJECT? DO YOU PREFER TO START OFF ON YOUR OWN?
There are some works you can only do on your own and there are works which must be done together with others. There is a certain way of life that is developing, whereby we tend to come together in small groups or in important meeting venues, and this trend involves all ages. It is impossible to work on your own when you are investigating social transformation processes like I am. This procedure requires comparing many different disciplines but, at the same time, it also requires a common strain, a common interest in social changes and renewals. I have always worked on both levels: personal and interpersonal.
In any case, my individual productions are always open towards the presence of a common reality and, therefore, towards the participation of others.
Take for instance “Quadri Specchianti” which I started producing in 1961: spectators become the direct elements of the work of art and the main actors of the show; or take “Cittaldellarte”, which is a work site that is open towards interdisciplinary and intersectional work.

WHAT VALUES COME FIRST IN LIFE?
First comes the value of communication between individuals. Other fundamental values are: relationships with the people with whom you are closest to, such as your family, and the value of the social efforts put into achieving a better atmosphere of civilisation.
Today, when we talk about civilisation, we must do so in global terms. This clearly entails the notion of “loving different” cultures, races, personalities, tastes, kinds. I have a saying: “eliminate distances and keep differences”. This expresses also my spiritual, economic and political view, in other words my fundamental values.

“The world is ruled by chaos. The unforeseeable lies forever in ambush” (publisher’s note). It is only after suffering great pain and distress following on an unexpected discovery beneath the blue cover of a notebook or experiencing great fear after a hearty laugh elicited by a scene in a silent movie has faded away that the lives of the leading characters in Paul Auster’s previous two novels, “Oracle Night” and ”The Book of Illusions”, undergo a deep change.

In his latest novel, “Brooklyn Follies”, a man seeking a quiet place where to silently put an end to a sad and ridiculous life sparks off a series of highly consequential events. To fill in the time apparently still left to him after a serious illness and a divorce, he starts making a record of the trifle daily accidents he recalls having befallen him in his long career as a person, such as the times he fell or tripped over, the embarrassing statements he had made, his slips of the tongue (“if I don’t believe it I don’t see it”). Life’s taught him that “nothing should ever be taken for granted”. Yet finding a long-lost and cherished nephew once more is something he hadn’t banked on; nor the fact of becoming deeply involved in the life of his neighbours; or of becoming acquainted with the strange owner of a bookshop; or of getting to know a young and bizarrely introverted grandchild and a woman. In the last lines, as he walks under a blue sky, he declares he is the happiest man alive. Trouble is it’s eight o’clock in the morning of that fraught day in September when yet another tragedy is about to strike.

Story-wise, it’s an open ending, in the usual Auster style. They’re the sort of endings he prefers, when things are still on the move, with still another page to be written, a new possible turn of events, another discovery to be made. Auster is an extraordinary poet of chance, and chance is effectively inexhaustible. His stories are built up around this acute awareness. That’s the way he’s always approached his craft as a writer, starting from his earliest poems right up to the fifth line of “New York Trilogy”, the astonishing novel that in the mid-nineties brought celebrity to the man who is today considered to be one of the greatest contemporary American writers.

Born in New Jersey in 1947, for several years Auster lived in France, writing poetry, interviewing famous writers, and eking out a living through all sorts of trades. The fifth line of the “Trilogy”, then, runs as follows: “… he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

But that was much later. In the beginning there was simply the event and its consequences”. In “Experiment in truth”, published in Italy, as all his other works, by Einaudi, the writer states that the idea for his first novel came from dialling a wrong number. A phone call to the wrong subscriber and a whole new world opens up. Writing and words are mean and medium to him for exploring the world. But then again, of course, the meaning potential of words is the ignition factor sparking off new events leading to unexpected and engrossing discoveries Auster has this to say about Quinn, the key character in “City of Glass”, the first part of the Trilogy: “What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories”. Like a never ending thread weaving a never ending fabric. Quick and keen at spotting coincidences and seeing where they may lead. Quick to catch onto any snag in the works, for there’s invariably a snag. The author always refrains from coming to any conclusion, from positing any explanation, from drawing any moral; such considerations and conceits are in fact quite irrelevant to him. What matters is the pleasure of the story and its telling. It’s about the unadulterated pleasure of feeling a sense of astonishment at how events may be more or less in or out of synch with one another, at how they jostle and jog with and overlay each other (who can say whether only apparently, seeing them one way or the other depending on what the listener perceives as relevant, on her experience, on how keenly attentive and boldly scrutinising she is).

That’s at least the impression one gets reading the works of this skilful storyteller. Being open- and sharp-eyed as to what goes on about us inevitably stirs up words, words which may lead us, if we’re willing and game enough to follow them through, to any place other than the one we’re in at the time. In a poem written many years ago, Auster claims that “there is no escape from the word that is born in the eye”. In another collection dated 1978 called “White space”, he writes: “Something happens, and from the moment it begins to happen, nothing can ever be the same again”.