Oggetti nella foresta – Jouets à jouer, the one just inaugurated at the Institute of italian cuture in Bruxelles by Centro Studi Poltronova has also the benefit of a unique feature in the documentation history of this radical design experience: for the first time all the products made under Poltronova supervisions are displayed under a single roof location. No one is left out. From the Superonda couch to the clam-lamp Gherpe by Superstudio; from Mies chair by Archizoom Associati to the Ultrafragola mirror by Ettore Sottsass. So that to fully comprehend this language that preferred “a postcard – like horizon complete with rainbow” to scientific progress – as declared by Archizoom inside the pages of October 1967 Domus 455 – no one is forced to dig into the Poltronova catalog in order to gain a complete spectrum. Otherwise Donatello D’Angelo set design would have been compromised in its concept, which consists in a series of rooms modeled over the painting series “città trasparenti” by Alberto Savinio. In which “flowers, bushes, flowing foliage, gloves magically become a lamp, mirror, sofa and armchair”. Isolated in their cromatic power through a “terrain” made of jammed black baloons. The effect is clearly of a forest, albeit made of plastic. Funny indeed, but loaded with the exact ambiguity of the late sixties, when among overabundance of signs and social instabilities a dream escapade could represent both freedom and a trap.
