Graffiti Took Over Our Store Spazio
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Earlier this month, Andrea Ceresa curated a flash exhibition to launch our limited edition glass, Punto. A hand-engraved clear tumbler inspired by Nutella jars’s cartoonish style, Punto was designed by graffiti artist Marco Laudadio. He created an installation with Ceresa placing tiny (but meaningful) objects from his childhood around the glass as a colorful, intimate frame. Both having a background in graffiti, the artist and the curator live-painted our store’s windows with dripping silver markers, temporarily dressing Spazio with their sketches. Visitors enjoyed a merenda – the Italian afternoon snack – including Nutella toasts and fresh bottled peach tea. The kind of childhood throwback we felt we needed after a long & hot day at work.
Photography by Giacomo Bianco. Browse more here.
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Autonoma Meets Firebird, the Chicago Art Community Where Glassblowing Helps Healing
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Photo: Alessandro Trevisan |
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Gun violence rate is especially high in Chicago, where shootings are six times more common than in New York City and three times more than in Los Angeles (and impact Black residents most.) Firebird Community Arts was born here as a non-profit intended to support gun violence survivors in their pathway toward healing. How? Offering glass-blowing and ceramics classes, community-building moments, and mentorships. Firebird’s signature Project Fire was co-founded by glass artist Pearl Dick in 2015 as a trauma recovery program for young firearm victims. Together with N’Kosi Barber, who’s also a glass artist, she’s been teaching there since day one, with their courses involving an increasing number of students every year. This month, Barber, Dick, and five of their students from Project Fire joined us for a 10-day glassblowing residency in Murano. Jojo, Cyencere, Jakwon, Chiontea, and Lynquell worked with Abate Zanetti’s fourth-grade students in the school’s hot shop, as part of Autonoma’s 2024 edition. The result was a series of goblets made by assembling the parts previously crafted by the participants during the workshop. “We wanted to honor Murano traditions, but also bring something of our own. In our studio’s furnace, we do a lot of sculpting, so we thought that was something we could bring to the table. So we made the cups, we made the sculptures for the stems, and on the last day, we put everything together,” Pearl Dick explained. It was an honor to meet the participants and witness two apparently distant worlds connecting through the art of glass. To celebrate Autonoma’s latest iteration, we produced a video, shot and edited by Raffaele Morandi. Learn more about the project here.
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Photos: Alessandro Trevisan |
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Book tip by Caterina Capelli
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This month’s book was chosen by me – Caterina Capelli, Laguna~B’s in-house writer.
“In an age when design seems to be able to do anything and solve any problem, what is it that design can’t do? This is the premise that spurred What Design Can’t Do - Essays on Design and Disillusion, the latest book by Rotterdam-based designer, critic, and researcher Silvio Lorusso, published in 2023 by Set Margins’.
In the publication, Lorusso reckons with the broken illusions of contemporary designers, who had been sold the idea that “design will save the world” but are now facing a discipline imbued with financial problems, gender, and racial bias, asphyxiating bureaucratic procedures, unpaid internships, and many other dooming factors. Mixing memes and captivating writing, the author lines up the limits of the project as a transformative tool of society, with a focus on graphic design: In a featured meme, a girl wears a hat saying “Typography can change the world Just kidding.” In questioning design’s role, Lorusso openly – and provocatively – criticizes the educational systems and institutions whose idea of design is fed up with nostalgia for a golden past that’s been largely “brushed away.” Instead, these essays invite designers to think that theirs is not a job but a condition, requiring dealing with chaos on a daily basis.”
The B~Library is an exciting Laguna~B side project. It is a book collection curated (and continuously updated) by @studio.bruno located at Spazio, in Dorsoduro 3276, Venice. Anyone can borrow any book every day from 10 AM to 7 PM. Come and visit! |
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Lessico Muranese: a Glassblowing Dictionary to Keep in Your Pocket
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Designed by our friend and creative consultant Erica Toffanin, the Murano Glassblowing Dictionary is a stylish, pocketbook version of the original Lessico Muranese written by the legendary glass master and entrepreneur Angelo Barovier in 1996.
As Autonoma’s 4th edition approached, we thought this sort of guide would have come in handy, especially for the Firebird team, who was about to spend 10 days at work in Murano. It’s intended as a useful compendium to help those who have to navigate the intricate and vast local glass vocabulary. Traditional, hyper-local tools and techniques have equally hyper-local names, and it isn’t easy to approach them without having the words. “The Barovier’s dictionary includes historical references, too, making it the perfect resource for anyone curious about glass,” Erica Toffanin said. |
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Our Connection to the Lagoon
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Establishing a scientifically valid baseline measure of key biodiversity indicators before initiating restoration efforts in the Venice salt marshes is crucial for assessing the effectiveness of Vital’s restoration projects. We are here Venice scientific team has collaborated with Associate Professor Judith Fisher to adapt and implement an innovative methodology developed in Western Australia. This methodology provides comprehensive ecological measures of change, essential for monitoring and guiding restoration efforts.
Discover more about our approach and how it can support high integrity investments for biodiversity restoration and conservation. Read the full article here. |
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Every month we update our Diary with behind-the-scenes photos from our everyday life at Laguna~B.
Check our July album here! |
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