Ospiti

14:30 ADI Design Museum   What does it mean, today, to take on the ancient craft of movable-type printing?   The first obstacle is to build a workshop. Unless you inherit the trade, recovering tools, materials and type from a technique that has almost disappeared demands skills far beyond the graphic arts: becoming designer, compositor, researcher, dealer in discarded materials, mover — and sometimes even mechanic. In fifteen years of research and adventure, chasing material from old print shops closing in every corner of Italy, I have built a substantial archive. The extraordinary variety of alphabets found — many without name, author or documentation — opened a question: how much do we really know about twentieth-century Italian type culture?   Alfabeti Modernisti Italiani, a research project on movable type produced in the 1930s and 1940s, is my answer to an intuition born in the field. The research reconstructs the historical, aesthetic and manufacturing context, surveying original Italian alphabets, relating them to the international scene and, at the same time, deepening their territorial specificities. What emerges is a heritage far more complex, rich and varied than we have known until now.