(14 August 2017) The touring exhibition “50+! Il Grande gioco dell’industria. Oggetti che hanno fatto la storia dell’impresa italiana” (50+! The Great Industrial Game. Objects that have forged the history of Italian industry) will open at the University of Technology of Durban Art Gallery in Durban, South Africa on August 17th at 17:30. It tells the story of Italian industry, design, and architecture through more than 50 objects The exhibition, curated by the Italian Institute of Culture of Pretoria, following Gauteng in April 2017, will now travel to Durban in collaboration with the Dante Alighieri Society and the Durban University of Technology. It will be open to the public, with free entry, until September 8th 2017, from 8:00 to 18:00 Monday to Thursday and 8:00 to 15:30 on Fridays. The exhibition, designed by Museimpresa and curated by Francesca Molteni, tells the story of Italian industry through 50 and a display of exhibition panels that divulge the ideas, projects, and the histories of objects that have now become icons of the collective imagination (such as Vespa, Campari Soda Bottle, the Barilla pasta box or Olivetti’s Valentine typewriter). The objects were chosen from museum archives and collections associated with Museimpresa with the collaboration of their curators. The exhibition, consists of 54 stories on 24 panels, The Game of the Goose, and a Guessing game. Like a time machine, it tells a story through inventions, intuitions, and chances born from the talent of the leading figures of the industry, workshop visionaries, workmen’s enthusiasm, and silence of studio tables. The “Great Industrial Game” is about the “Made in Italy” objects that have changed the customs, history, economy, and lifestyle of Italian society. Objects with an exceptional symbolic value and industrial history: sacred and domestic, museums-quality and household objects built by renowned names or small craftsmen, have shaped the collective imagination of a nation with rapid and unexpected technological innovations. With turbines and samplers, ‘on the road’ objects and musical instruments, bottles, furnishings and logos, vivid fabrics and gasometres, motors, ceramics and Moviolas, pharmaceutical calculators and packaging machines, toys and carriers; it draws on historical memory along an imaginary line intersected by history, communication, design, and innovation that made these objects icons.
