In the first episode of Enzo Mari Costellazione series host and curator Alice Rawsthorn dialogues with Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Enzo Mari's retrospective at Triennale to unfold the exhibition genesis, inspired by the constant exchange between Mari and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

"When I worked at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 1990s, I also had a professorship at the IUAV university in Venice, where I taught art and curatorial studies invited by Marco De Michelis and Angela Vettese. Every second week, I’d take the night train from Paris to Venice. At the time, my friend Stefano Boeri was the professor of architecture at the same university, and we decided to run a seminar together, bridging art and architecture. Soon after, Boeri became the editor-in-chief of Domus and asked me to compile the arts pages for the magazine with Joseph Grima; so for a couple of years I edited this segment. Working in Milan, which has always been a highly influential city for design, my research in design started to intensify. During this collaboration with Boeri, we’d have dinners at his house with a ground-breaking generation of architects and designers, from Andrea Branzi, Achille Castiglioni, Cini Boeri, Vico Magistretti, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Nanda Vigo to, of course, Enzo Mari. [...] Mari he’s an industrial designer, a furniture designer, an exhibition-maker, an artist, a manifesto-writer, a polemicist especially famous for his rages against the design world. Whenever I travelled through Milan from Paris to Venice, I’d never miss an opportunity to meet up with him and his partner, the seminal feminist art critic, curator and pioneer of performance art Lea Vergine, and we’d go and see some shows together."

Hans Ulrich Obrist

“If I had to choose three projects by Mari, the first would be Autoprogettazione and the idea of knowlodge production. What I think it is interesting is that he wanted to design in order to produce knowledge, something he also talked about a lot in the Conversation. The Autoprogettazione it was not only the idea of democratization of design, which is of course this very historic, but I think what is striking is this idea of knowledge production that he wanted to carried out to improve one person understanding. It was almost as a school, a DIY school for design. The second one is the Mobile Library and the third one is the Calendar, because I live with it everyday.”

Hans Ulrich Obrist