Enzo Mari, Allestimento modulare a struttura prismatica, 1966. Per l'esposizione della produzione di Danese Milano
Designer Martino Gamper on his relationship with Enzo Mari in the second episode of Enzo Mari Costellazione
November 12 2020
In the second episode of Enzo Mari Costellazione series curator and host Alice Rawsthorn dialogues with designer Martino Gamper who met Enzo Mari when he was studying design in Wien.
Enzo Mari Costellazione, Episodio 2
"At the beginning when Enzo Mari arrives at the Academy of Fine Arts, we had very little knowledge of him. It was all about form-follows-function and not form-follows-thought. And Mari was respectively forgotten in the early Nineties. But it didn’t take long to understand that his knowledge of design was very strong and very deep: an intellectual way of looking at design.
When Enzo Mari was a teacher, it didn’t take him a lot to understand if an idea was good or not. If you couldn't communicate any idea with three sketches, it wasn’t worth continuing."
Martino Gamper
"If I have to choose three projects by Mari, the first is one of the earlier project I can remember: an exhibition design for Danese, made from cardboard and he called it Stuttura Cellulare, his way of folding the pieces of cardboard in three-dimensional spaces it is very interesting, by looking at the cardboard fibers, that was important also for him.
The second choice is an obvious one: the Autoprogettazione, we all wished we had invented it. And what he was interested in, it was having the feedbacks. […]
My third favorite is called Samos, a series of porcelain objects he called it Proposta per la lavorazione a mano della porcellana: how you could create objects from a single piece of clay without being a master? I think this is a very poetic way of using clay."
Martino Gamper
Allestimenti modulari di cartone per l'esposizione della produzione di Danese.
Allestimento modulare a struttura cellulare in cartone bianco, 1964
Allestimento-libreria, cartone fustellato e ripiani in PVC stampato sottovuoto, 1969
Allestimento a moduli trapezoidali di cartone, 1965
Proposta per la lavorazione a mano della porcellana, ciotola della Serie Samos, 1973
Proposta per un'Autoprogettazione, 1973
Martino Gamper, 100 Chairs in 100 Days, XXII Triennale di Milano Broken Nature
As its name suggests, the project by Martino Gamper 100 Chairs in 100 Days involves producing one chair a day over a period of a hundred days. Scavenging in alleyways and at friends’ homes in London, Gamper gathers pieces of discarded old chairs and other furniture and materials into playful assemblages that merge and marry different stylistic schools and structural elements in curious pastiches of design history. Moreover, the self-imposed constraints of time and resources speak to larger environmental concerns surrounding trends of discarding still-viable products in favor of newer models or styles.
Martino Gamper lives and works in London. Starting as an apprentice with a furniture maker in Merano, Gamper went on to study sculpture under Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He completed a Masters in 2000 from the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied under Ron Arad. Working across design and art venues, Martino Gamper engages in a variety of projects from exhibition design, interior design, one-off commissions, and the design of mass-produced products for the cutting edge of the international furniture industry.
Related events
