The Fondazione Ermanno Casoli organizes a new workshop for the students of the fourth edition of the Master’s degree in Economics and Art and Heritage Management of the Sole 24 Ore Business School. Thursday 26 September, on the main premises of the Gruppo24ORE in Milan, the artist Margherita Moscardini conducts a workshop part of the E-STRAORDINARIO training programme, organized by FEC to promote contemporary art as an effective educational and methodological tool, capable of fostering important innovation processes in work and study environments. The initiative is curated by Marcello Smarrelli, artistic director of the Fondazione.
In 2012, Sole 24 Ore had already invited FEC to introduce E-STRAORDINARIO in the programme of its prestigious Master’s degree, with a workshop conducted by artist Marinella Senatore. The Master’s degree objective is to train professionals capable of developing and enhancing the Italian art “system”. Interaction, exchange and experimentation are the key words of FEC’s activities, inviting international artists to encounter corporate employees and collectively create a work of art or share an artistic experience with them. This collaboration proves fruitful both for the company, that can identify cutting-edge contents and languages which prove extremely useful in being ahead of the needs of a society in continuous evolution, and for the artists who can explore interesting new fields of expression. For all these reasons, the Business School and FEC have become natural partners in the promotion of an active dialogue between art and enterprises.
Margherita Moscardini’s research focuses on the relation between a place and the social reality living in it, and investigates the ongoing transformations affecting the space. On this occasion the artist presents a project entitled Condominium which she already carried out with thirty employees at MSD Italia, a branch of the Merck pharmaceutical corporation during the E-STRAORDINARIO x MSD Italia, organized in 2012 by the Hic et Nunc coaching consultancy e curaded by FEC. The objective in fact is to involve the students of the Master’s degree into a programme designed for a company, tackling and analysing similar contents and methodologies.
The project is based on the concept of standard, “a model – explains Moscardini – that before becoming a convention, was a desirable model, a utopian ideal the communities could eventually benefit from”. Considering the utopian models adopted by enterprises, the artist brings up the example of the Village of Crespi d’Adda, built at the end of the 19th century by the entrepreneur Cristoforo Benigno Crespi next to his textile plant, on the shores of the Adda River.
A small-scale perfect world where the owner “ruled” from his castle paternally taking care of all the needs of his employees. “What would be the ideal housing solution for the employees of a large corporation today?” This is the question raised by Moscardini. The workshop will start from these considerations and involve the participants in a practice close to a demonstrative simulation of a state of emergency: the outcome of this experience will become a book with relief images, a visual metaphor of a condominium.
