NELLA TERRA IL CIELO

Michele De Lucchi e Mariangela Gualtieri

With the next work along the artistic path, conceived by the Italian architect and designer Michele De Lucchi, narration itself becomes a work of art: from the relationship with the world, the visitor moves into the dimension of an individual relationship with nature, set, however, within a “non-time” that belongs to mythology.

Here, De Lucchi reverses the classical relationship between myth, ritual and storytelling, placing the latter at the beginning of the process. Everything begins, in fact, with a poem by the Italian poet Mariangela Gualtieri, which allows De Lucchi’s distinctive structure to re-create itself differently with each listening. Storytelling thus becomes the foundation of a construction deliberately conceived as open, with an uninterrupted interaction between inside and outside.

Artist biography

Born in 1951 in Ferrara, he graduated in architecture in Florence. He was among the leading figures of movements such as Cavart, Alchimia and Memphis. He has designed lamps and furniture elements for some of the best-known Italian and European companies, including Artemide, Olivetti, Alias, Unifor, Hermès and Alessi. Head of Design at Olivetti from 1988 to 2002, he developed various personal theories on the evolution of the office. He has designed and renovated buildings not only in Italy, but also in Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Georgia.

He has curated numerous art and design exhibition installations and designed buildings for museums and cultural institutions such as the Triennale di Milano, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the Neues Museum in Berlin and Fondazione Cini in Venice. More recently, for the city of Milan, he designed several pavilions for Expo 2015 and the UniCredit Pavilion in Piazza Gae Aulenti. His professional work has always been accompanied by personal research into the themes of design, technology and craftsmanship. In 1990 he founded “Produzione Privata”, a small company through which De Lucchi designs products made using artisanal techniques and skills. A selection of his objects is exhibited in some of the world’s most important museums.

Poet biography

Poet and playwright, Mariangela Gualtieri (Cesena, 1951) graduated in Architecture in Venice. Since 1983 she has been the soul, body and voice of Teatro Valdoca, founded in Cesena together with director Cesare Ronconi. Originally created as a music and theatre collective, Teatro Valdoca established itself within the Italian avant-garde theatre scene through a fruitful combination of dance and performance, later enriched by the encounter with, and active involvement of, some of the major Italian poets of the second half of the twentieth century — Fortini, Luzi, Bigongiari, Loi, Cucchi, Sicari, Rosselli, Merini and Majorino — in the Poetry School directed by Milo De Angelis.

This experience left an indelible mark on Gualtieri’s writing (“I have been beautified, nourished and grown by the words of others, and I am filled with fraternal gratitude”), which she has since continued to develop steadily, also through writing workshops and sessions devoted to reading poetry aloud into the microphone. From her debut with Antenata (Crocetti, 1992) to Quando non morivo (Einaudi, 2019) and A braccia aperte (Carabba, 2022), she has published several poetry books and received numerous awards. In 2020, during the Covid-19 emergency, her verse work Nove marzo duemilaventi appeared in the pages of Doppiozero. In 2022 she published L’incanto fonico. L’arte di dire la poesia with Einaudi; in 2024, the poetry collections Bello mondo and Ruvido umano.

Michele De Lucchi e Mariangela Gualtieri
Nella terra il cielo
Come raggiungerci

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