MILAN — Operating in art, design, objects and architecture, design duo Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari of Atelier Biagetti examine issues like humanity’s fixation on wealth and fame, sex and beauty with their experience-based immersive installations, designboom writes. The duo’s installations decontextualize visual elements challenging preconceptions of the mind and the physical reality of the surrounding environment. Each project tells a story.
We all act in a big ‘contemporary theatre’ where the goings-on in society around us are much faster than either art or design. we use design together with video and performance, as an expressive medium — it is a codified visual alphabet which we use to work on the boundaries between the unexpected and that which is sedimented in our memories. the objects that populate our houses record and narrate our behavior — even if we do not realize it. they witness actions that take place in that most natural, private and fertile environment — the home. it is very interesting.
Their latest project GOD, featuring gold bars, a glitzy swing and an inflatable light, strives to shed light on humanity’s infatuation with money and wealth—the modern deity of the human race.
GOD interpreted by Baldassari and Biagetti does not aim to fuel a theological debate, it rather investigates something that in today’s society is (or seems to be) all-consuming and all-powerful; something that is at the root of all our rules and aspirations and thus governs the way we live our lives — that something is money and with it the ever more abstract idea of value whether moral, actual or virtual.
The Island, Swing with brass structure hand-coated with gold foils and gold silk rope and fringes, 23 x 18 x 16 inches.
Tornello, Table with structure in chrome plated steel, details in polished brass and ultra-white glass top, 47 x 73 x 28 inches.
The GOD Light, Leather seat with details and structure in aluminum and galvanized brass. Wheels in plexiglass, inflatable 63 x 37 x 50 inches; case 15 x 18 x 14 inches
Lingotto, Gold leather bench, 63 x 27 x 20 inches
Euforia, Plexiglass shelving system with polished brass base and structure with led lights, 33 x 118 x 140 inches
In 2015, the duo created ‘Body Building,’ which examined power and beauty through the subject of the human body. The team created a gym rat’s dream highlighting our compulsion to attain the perfect body. They followed that with ‘NO SEX’ (2016), which looked at society’s fixation on sex.
This project looks at the facts and tendencies of the world around us. Once again it involves the body but this time Biagetti and Baldassari go even deeper, into the psyche, to concentrate on the perception and the accessibility of sex in the world today, bombarded as it is by ever more excessive and explicit images made available to anyone at any time thanks to the internet.
Bodybuilding installation view
Bodybuilding installation view
Bodybuilding installation view
No Sex installation view
No Sex installation view
Required reading: Check out this interview between designboom and Atelier Biagetti.
About the Studio: Atelier Biagetti is a Milan-based studio founded by Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari in 2003. The practice operates in the fields of art, design and architecture, creating objects, interiors and site-specific installations.
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