Most events on schedule during Milan Design Week naturally focus on fields such as architecture and interior decor (with the odd fashion or technology twist), but this year there seems to be space also for pondering about social issues.
Two years ago the windows at la Rinascente invited passers by to stop and think about the potential of design via a textile-based installation, this year instead Georgian artist Vajiko Chachkhiani was invited to create two site-specific projects for the historical retailer.
Born in Tbilisi, but living and working in Berlin, Chachkhiani studied Mathematics and Informatics at the local Technical University, before turning to Fine Arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
The artist usually explores and analyses personal experiences employing raw materials and his installations are often metaphors for the interior life of human beings or comments about the human condition.
The first installation for la Rinascente - "Under The Midday Sun" (until 22nd April) - occupies the eight windows overlooking Piazza Duomo. The windows feature prototypes of unfinished sculptures, representing fragmented figures of a cotton picker, a horse and a tiger.
The pale blue figures contrast with the dead bushes and trees surrounding them and seem to be caught up in a wind storm threatening to sweep them away.
This is actually a strong metaphor behind the fragmented figures: while the installation looks back at history and at cotton pickers who had very low wages, it also focuses on our modern times and to the fact that, while certain manual jobs may be disappearing, even in modern times we do have poorly paid jobs that are crushing people's minds and souls, radically transforming or even destroying them, like a strong wind can alter a landscape.
Chachkhiani's windows have therefore a double nature, as they look back at history while reshifting the discourse to some of the key issues of our society, making in this way a contemporary statement about unemployment and workers being paid less than the minimum wage.
The project also assumes a more radical meaning since it is displayed in the windows of a department store, so a temple of capitalism, even though la Rinascente during Milan Design Week mainly uses the windows as art displays and does not employ the trendy installations inside them as background decor to sell products.
The installation is accompanied by a film, "Cotton Candy", the second part of this commission by la Rinascente to Chachkhiani.
The film is an intimate and emotional story of a grandmother who takes stock of her life while watching a circus performance with her granddaughter and finally manages to have an internal dialogue with herself that revolves around the themes of melancholy, grief and sadness.
The ending remains open, but more people will get a chance to find their own interpretation for the film conclusion in the next few months: Vajiko Chachkhiani's projects for la Rinascente will indeed leave Milan after the local design week to be displayed in international museums of contemporary art.
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