House for Juliet @ Studio Alchimia

“Casa per Giulietta” (House for Juliet) is an intervention by Alessandro Mendini in the building that according to legend (and partly but only partly according to. history and findings) is identified as a wing of the Capulets’ palace. A place of tourism and almost of tourist ‘pilgrimage’, this little palace in the heart of Verona preserves, as everyone knows, certain environmental memories that lead back, with some poetic freedom, to the facts, to those famous facts of an impossible love and a still infantile death: the love and death of Romeo and Juliet, “the child lover”, as Alessandro Mendini writes, “symbol of the secret passion in the night”.

For the rest, this building has everything and nothing to offer: repeated interventions, occasional reconstructions on the margins of any historical interest, and yet in it real stratifications of desiring impulses, romantic yearnings, high literary culture and everyday popular fantasy are condensed and superimposed. Few are aware, outside Verona, that there are still those who, victims of ur impossible and desperate love, write to Juliet in the wake of a tradition that, to say the least, induces a smile, but which it would be at least gratuitous and the result of simplistic cynicism to consider with ungenerous and aristocratic contempt. Alessandro Mendini was invited by the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna to intervene in this context by symbolically and metaphorically “furnishing” the house, which is presented without any furniture.

Mendini was thought of because the current editor of the prestigious monthly magazine “Domus” likes to move on a plane of absolute precariousness” rejecting the limits of traditional disciplines.

Architecture, design, journalism, writing and theory, these and other activities in Mendini do not overlap in good order but intertwine with each other, as singularly polluted by different cultural lives and different fantastical projections is this place of ghosts and forbidden words that tourists and love pilgrims’ insist on visiting under their breath.

The neo-modern furniture on which Mendini (who is the neo-modern’s most combative prophet) has focused his attention is succinctly summarised in five beds “The bed in the home is not an easy object like so many others,” Mendini writes in the catalogue, “the real bed is a dwelling in the dwelling, it is the absolutely most intimate place in an individual’s life. …the continual necessary return to the mother’s womb, the periodic training for eternal sleep, the insane loss of senses experienced by Ophelia in the water, by Sleeping Beauty in the woods, by Snow White in the mountains”.

Bed of the nightmare, of the groom, of flowers, of apparent death, of conflict: these are the five beds that Mendini has designed for Giulietta and her House, using “all immaterials suitable for both the most delicate poetry and the most profound kitsch”.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication edited by Edizioni Bianca & Volta of Bologna and will contain, in addition to images of the furnishings, an exhaustive “reportage” of the performance organised by a group of young people on the evening of the inauguration. The House will remain ‘furnished’ until 30 September.

Realisation
Studio Alchimia – Carla Ceccariglia, Frans Vogelaar
Coordination Paola Navone

“Vicino Giulietta” action by Antonio Sixty – Out Off
with the voices of: Tony Allyn, Magda Guerriero, Carmen Harrick, Fulvio Ricciardi and the Novaro Dance School.

They made the exhibition possible by Zibetti Mira-x Fabrics, Torneria Vecchi Zanotta, Osram, Operation Open