“Archaeo Design” is a methodological design approach created with the aim of highlighting the value of the relationship between design and ancient culture, created by Professors Elisabetta Furin and Maddalena Vantaggi of the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts in collaboration with Maria Angela Turchetti, director of the MANU – National Archaeological Museum of Umbria in Perugia.
“Archaeo Design” is a tool for reinterpreting the past, which through design culture, allows new forms, functions, processes, behaviours and more sustainable scenarios, with a special focus on the social and cultural dimension of everyday life. For this reason, it aims to become a critical and methodological synthesis of a cultural and historical context, analysing the design actions of other designers who have related to the antique. Furin and Vantaggi, have therefore developed an innovative study that has led them to identify five design approaches, which synthesise and help to understand how design has approached the forms of the past to date: the formal synthetic approach, the decorative approach, the neo-primitive approach, the citationist approach, and the compensatory approach.
The aim of “Archaeo Design” is therefore to develop in the designer the ability to critically reinterpret archaeological finds through a design that is able to grasp and enhance the good practices of past civilisations, closer to the rhythms of nature and to a less mediated social life. Indeed, in the everyday life of ancient peoples lie our roots from which to draw for the rediscovery of a present that we have the opportunity to evolve into a different future.
“Archaeo Design” is a three-year project: over the next two years, again in cooperation with MANU, two other new themes relating to everyday life will be addressed, which will be the leitmotif of the projects that will be displayed at the museum in the two respective exhibitions.
In the first edition of “Archaeo Design”, held during A.A. 2021/22, the theme chosen for the experimentation of the methodological approach was the Etruscan banquet, an important daily ritual and symbolic from a social and cultural point of view. The students of the third year of the Academy’s Design course, guided by Professors Furin and Vantaggi with the support of Director Turchetti, were invited to reinterpret the artefacts in the MANU relating to this theme. After studying the five approaches and investigating the possibilities of reinterpreting the antique offered by design, the young designers came up with 18 projects for accessories and furniture inspired by conviviality, aimed at the needs of today’s international tableware market. They then produced realistic models, with the support of craftsmen and companies, favouring local materials and traditional techniques combined with new-generation sustainable materials and innovative processing technologies.
“Archaeo Design – The banquet”, is the exhibition event inaugurated on 28 October 2022 at the MANU that brought the results of the research to the public, placing side by side the realistic models of the proposals elaborated by the students with the archaeological items from which they drew their inspiration. This interesting confrontation between the ancient and the contemporary, highlighted the potential of a projectuality that knows how to look at the past in a critical and conscious key.
