More photos : https://manymani.tumblr.com/

More info about CUCULA : https://www.cucula.org/en/

with CUCULA

ManyMani / Fondazione Pistoletto / Biella / IT

“Everybody should design to avoid being designed” said Enzo Mari in 1999, and he keeps repeating it. These words prompted the reflection for the Workshop of Self-construction held for three weeks at Cittadellarte by Mattia Paco Rizzi, of which the exhibition “ManyMani” puts on display (and potentially on sale) the results, i.e. the design objects created, built and tested by the participants.
The Workshop was addressed to refugees and asylum seekers mainly coming from West Africa and the Middle East, housed by the cooperative Tantintenti in Biella, and to local youths. The basic idea of the Workshop was to give them the opportunity to understand and develop the various phases of the methodology of planning a design object through an artistic approach, so that they could design and build their own pieces of furniture “with their own hands”, with the simple use of glue, nails and wood boards.
The project was inspired – but with a few differences – by the experience of “CUCULA - The Refugees Company for Crafts and Design”, a design company created in Berlin in 2013 with the objective of producing – together with a group of migrants and asylum seekers – a concrete proposal of a “different reality”.
Mattia Paco Rizzi is the architect artist invited for the third edition of the “Connective Residency”, a programme addressed to international artists with the aim of generating connections between the practices of the guest artists and the projects developed by Cittadellarte in close collaboration with local associations.