CASA ITALIA PARIS 2024

Saturday 27 July saw the opening of Casa Italia Paris 2024 at Le Pré Catelan - the venue chosen by CONI - the Italian National Olympic Committee - to welcome the athletes of the Italy Team and its guests during the XXXIII Olympic Games in Paris scheduled until 11 August 2024. For the first time in the history of Casa Italia, the public will be able to enter and immerse themselves in a true exhibition, scenographic and emotional journey: a total work of art, architecture and design entitled Ensemble. It was in this landmark building, a Napoleon III-style construction nestled in the Bois de Boulogne, the city's largest park and a few steps away from the Champs-Élysée, that on the evening of 23 June 1894, the dinner celebrating the birth of the Olympic Games of the modern era, desired by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, took place.

For Paris 2024, Casa Italia creates a strong symbolic and, at the same time, concrete link with the ‘Father’ of the modern Olympics and with France, the closest ‘brother’ country since the age of the Roman Empire, which through its revolution initiated a process of awareness of community and democratic principles. Of the motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité that characterises the French Revolution, Casa Italia Paris 2024 focuses on Fraternity, the term most in tune with the founding values of the Olympic spirit and the most necessary in this era torn by new conflicts and pandemic threats, to imagine a new utopia and a new peace. As a matter of fact, fraternity implies collaboration, cooperation, common construction, but also the story of Italian identity, the result of centuries of encounters with other peoples, other cultures and continuous stratifications. Recognising in the other our brother, regardless of the differences that make each individual unique, is one of the great teachings of the Olympic movement and, likewise, in its uniqueness, Italy is a tangible example of how encounters with otherness create cultural wealth and development.

Developing, therefore, the Ensemble concept, Casa Italia Paris 2024 has transformed Le Pré Catelan - a building articulated in various rooms flooded with light, thanks to the many windows and the garden that surrounds it - in which nature, art, architecture, furniture design and light design are in close dialogue with each other. The revamping of the garden with the inclusion of essences belonging to the Italian landscape, the works of art, the setting up of the rooms and the design give life to a different space, inspired by the great interiors of our tradition, by the 20th century masters who have made Italian creativity famous throughout the world and given shape to that vocation for hospitality that has always distinguished us.

The itinerary is marked by the works of 19 leading artists of Italian contemporary art - Vincenzo Agnetti, Marco Bernardi, Giovanni Bonotto, Sergio Breviario, Claire Fontaine, Paolo Delle Monache, Alberto Di Fabio, Agostino Iacurci, Francesco Jodice, Margherita Moscardini, Matteo Nasini, Gabriele Picco, Julie Polidoro, Riccardo Previdi, Edoardo Tresoldi, Marinella Senatore, Stalker, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Fabio Viale - and the creations of 32 internationally renowned designers for 12 companies that constitute the excellence of Italian design. And we find: Francesco Binfaré, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Jacopo Foggini, Masanori Umeda for Edra, Marco Lavit, Patrick Norguet, Marcello Ziliani for Ethimo, Mario Bellini, Piero Lissoni, Patricia Urquiola, Tokujin Yoshioka for Glas Italia, Ron Arad, Tord Boontje, Sebastian Herkner, Marc Thorpe for Moroso, Brodie Neill for Riva 1920 that have been the companies working alongside Casa Italia for several years. They were joined by: Monica Armani, Mario Bellini, Antonio Citterio, Piero Lissoni, Gaetano Pesce, Patricia Urquiola for B&B Italia, Michael Anastassiades, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Piero Lissoni, Jasper Morrison, Barber & Osgerby, Marcel Wanders for Flos, Impatia, De Pas - D'Urbino - Lomazzi, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio for Poltronova, Formafantasma, Nava+Arosio for Rubelli.

The architectural project is based on the link between the new and the existing, between artifice and nature; the first declination of the Ensemble concept is that of interweaving, already inherent in the Olympic Circles. According to sociologist Tim Ingold's interpretation, the world - in this case the Olympic world - can be thought of as a mesh, a fabric of lines knotted together where the knots are the centre of things. It is the fabric that makes manifest the interweaving of threads, the idea of building together through bonds, and it is the fabric that is the main material of the Casa Italia installation. Conceived as a series of rooms within rooms, the House appears as a succession of new rooms installed in the 19th-century architecture of Pré Catelan through the use of a semi-transparent fabric, in a continuous process of mutual enhancement that also reverberates in the outdoor spaces.

This incessant osmosis also emerges in the furnishings, in which a careful selection of iconic design elements, both from the past and contemporary, emphasises a strong dialogue, both aesthetic and meaningful, with the context and the setting, through the choice of shapes, colours and materials.

Great attention has been paid to environmental sustainability. In fact, the predominant use of natural and recycled fabrics, which reduce the overall weight of transporting the fitting materials, thus cutting CO2 emissions, allows the project to be sustainable and reduce its impact on the ecosystem. Italian design objects are also used in the furnishings that are intrinsically sustainable, not only because of the commitment made by all the companies involved in the conception of the product life cycle with virtuous processes, but because they are destined to last over time and be handed down. Many design elements have been chosen or designed to express this ecological sensitivity through a strong aesthetic and material component: furniture in wood, terracotta, enamelled lava, raw fabrics, cellulose, recycled plastic. The press room of Casa Italia, for example, is zero-impact thanks to the protocol signed with the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Safety, and the support of Federlegno and its member companies. Sustainability is a further landing place of the Ensemble concept because the climate upheavals and environmental disasters of the present and near future can only be thought of in a dimension of collective collaboration.

Direction: Lorenzo Pellicelli, Marketing CONI
Concept: curated by Marketing direction of CONI and Beatrice Bertini
Artistic Project: curated by Beatrice Bertini and Benedetta Acciari
Set up project: studio di architettura IT’S
Lighting project: Fabertechnica and Massimo Pascucci
Landscape project: studio Natura e Architettura
Technological project: InformaSistemi
Art Direction: Francesco de Figueiredo, Nero Editions
Interior design: curated by Atelier Bianca E. Patroni Griffi
Audio and video content: Stand By Me
Graphic identity: Leonardo Sonnoli
Project manager: Mariafederica Pacces Asti
Website: Nero Editions