An E-straordinario world

data: 
30 September 2013

An apartment building consisting of 22 colourful and imaginative flats.
What could it be? An architecture course? A school of design? A master’s degree for interior designers? No, we’re in just one of the many possible worlds of E-STRAORDINARIO, the program of workshops developed by the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli in which contemporary art meets the world of business.
A real invention: it was in 2008 when, within the Elica company itself in Fabriano, the first series of workshops was organized with the participation of three artists, Ettore Favini, Christian Frosi and Nico Vascellari, working alongside Elica employees.
Subsequently, the FEC began to “export” E-STRAORDINARIO, with a host of organizations and training companies recognizing the potential of contemporary art as a methodological tool for the fostering of processes of innovation, team building, training and new perspectives. In recent years, the FEC has involved a number of artists in the E -STRAORDINARIO “training process” (including events abroad): Airò, Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Caesar Pietroiusti and Marinella Senatore, just to name a few.
But let’s get back to our condo. On 26th September, it was the turn of Margherita Moscardini, one of the leading Italian artists of her generation, to run a workshop for the Master’s in Economics and Management of Art and Cultural Heritage of the Il Sole 24 Ore Business School in Milan. Moscardini devised Condominium, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, which had 22 of the Master’s students participating in a real training exercise aimed at the creation of a condominium consisting of apartments made out of embossed card, which will then go to make up a volume similar to a pop-up book. The artist told her students about the experience of the village of Crespi d’Adda, built next to his textile factory at the end of the nineteenth century by entrepreneur Cristoforo Benigno Crespi: a perfect little world in which Crespi “reigned” from his castle and looked after all his employees’ needs like a father. Students constructed their building along the same lines, with every apartment representing a multiplicity of instances and inspirations.
Another workshop, then, capable of stimulating creativity, thought and action.
Everything seems simple, everything seems possible, when contemporary art is brought into play. E-STRAORDINARIO, in a word.