The most significant innovation of the new edition of the Lake Como Design will be the public opening of the 'Chilometro della Conoscenza', in collaboration with the Villa del Grumello Association and the Antonio Ratti Foundation, which will host the Contemporary Design Selection of the festival.
Photo: Lake Como Design Festival
Located near the centre of the city of Como, Chilometro della Conoscenza brings together, through 15 hectares of centuries-old parks, various architectures such as greenhouses, chapels, lemon groves, and docks where, much like a dispersed kunsthalle, the setups of projects selected by Giovanna Massoni will find space. This creates a new, widespread exhibition path, immersed in greenery and overlooking the shores of Lake Como.
Borrowing Italo Calvinoʼs concept of lightness - the theme of this yearʼs Lake Como Design Festival - it could be argued that design is an elaborate form of storytelling that, as the author wrote in his 'Six Memos for the New Millennium'(1988), 'would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.'
For Calvino, lightness is a literary device and at the same time a cognitive path that the writer uses to narrate the world, observing it from a distance that allows complex scenarios to be understood, created and shared. Similarly, the design process is the result of an indirect vision made possible by the sudden 'agile leap of the poet' to free ourselves from precept and prejudice, from what is arbitrarily established as permanent and certain. Design, like Perseus in his winged sandals, is the conscious shifting of points of observation, it is the widening of perspectives, it is the surprising emergence of new meanings.
More information:
Lake Como Design Selection
www.lakecomodesignfestival.com