Prada expands cultural programme to digital channels

As Italian retailers and brands face temporary closures during the current health emergency, a new wave of initiatives is bucking the challenge to experience news ways of operating and communicating.

The Fondazione Prada is at the forefront to continue to culturally engage in the context where there is no physical audience.

Digital laboratory of ideas

Focusing on “remote” visitors, the Fondazione Prada’s and its social media channels have been turned into a laboratory of ideas, a flexible platform in which to test new formats and codes that will be able to develop in a further way in the future, beyond the current emergency.

The foundation has opened its archive where via a list of key words users can explore its “Glossary” section. By publishing archive images and videos, unpublished texts, excerpts from catalogues and reviews from the press, thematic paths and ideal dialogues between various activities will be established, Fondazione Prada said in a statement.

“During the temporary closure of exhibition spaces, the Cinema projects, the workshops of Accademia dei bambini, and the editorial activities invent new ways of fruition and participation of our audience,” Fondazione Prada said.

For housebound creatives, Adobe has also offered its Creative Cloud users two months for free, as many artists and designers who rely on its software and app are forced to work from home.

In the UK, Marguerite London, a social membership group for women in the visual arts, has launched a networking list to connect creators with available jobs and gigs, reports The Art Newspaper.” As we’ve had to cancel our events for the foreseeable, it was important to act quickly to provide an alternative space in which people of all genders could come together to support one another at this difficult time,” the group’s founder Joanna Payne told the publication.

Images courtesy Fondazione Prada