ALCANTARA – MAXXI PROJECT 2021 / STUDIO VISIT. NERI&HU "TRAVERSING THRESHOLDS"

Ten years after the beginning of the collaboration between Alcantara and the MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, the partnership between the company and the Museum, centered around research on contemporary design topics, continues with the fourth edition of Studio Visit.

Curated by Domitilla Dardi (MAXXI Design Curator) this project, which brings together the Masters of the past and those of the present, invited to provide a key to understanding the architectural-design heritage by using Alcantara^® as their principal language of interpretation.

Alcantara has placed at the disposal its exceptional properties of flexibility and formal interpretation, qualities that are equally essential to the performance of a conceptual research.

After Nanda Vigo, Formafantasma, Konstantin Grcic, for the 2021 edition Studio Visit Program invited the Neri&Hu studio, which confronted one of the greatest authors whose work is comprised in the archives: Carlo Scarpa.

With Traversing Thresholds, the interdisciplinary architectural design studio, based in Shanghai, builds a cultural bridge between the western and eastern worlds, between sensitivity and vision.

The authors have identified the Scarpian interpretation in the notion of “threshold”, a concept existing in both the Chinese ‘jian’, and in the Japanese ‘ma’, which can be roughly translated as a “gap”, “space”, or “pause”. In an architectural sense, this term is often used to describe a threshold condition, or the physical mediation between two contrasting spatial environments, such as interiority and exteriority, public and private; a state which reappears in the spatial passages of the Italian Master.

The installation designed by Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu reinterprets Scarpa’s vision in its central nodes: the invention of detail, the dialogue between solids and voids, the creative combination of materials.  It is in this latter ambit that the presence of Alcantara, with the full potential offered by its versatility, makes the work an authentic nexus between past and present.

As the three works of the past editions, Neri&Hu’s installation will become part of the
MAXXI Architecture permanent collection.