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Lucy Orta mentor for IED

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Image: Istituto Europeo di Design

Istituto Europeo di Design entrusts international visual artist Lucy Orta with a mentorship role to lead a project that will promote interaction between art and fashion, culminating in an installation at Pitti Uomo 104.

14 June 2023 | Florence | Museo degli Innocenti

English artist Lucy Orta has been invited by IED to Mentor a group of students selected from all the Group's campuses in Italy, Spain and Brazil to work on the conception and creation of a large installation on the theme of transition that will be exhibited at Salone Brunelleschi of Istituto degli Innocenti on 14 June on the occasion of Pitti Uomo 104.

IED chose Lucy Orta because of her talent in combining drawing, sculpture, textiles, photography, film, performance, and her use of innovative language to address co-creation issues that concern the contemporary world: community and social inclusion, mobility, sustainable development and human rights.

“I’m delighted to be invited to mentor the group of talented international students in this significant milestone in their creative journey. In the stimulating discussions we have held online and at IED Firenze, the young designers have become active protagonists of a future world we will need to inhabit. They are confronting environmental instability and multiple anxieties to imagine positive and adaptive scenarios. A future inhabited by beings with multiple identities and man-nature-machine hybrids of the Novacene. The original ideas germinating in their sketchbooks will be drawn together into a fertile installation, with material and technological research at the core: dresses designed by generative AI, textiles emit songs or grow by themselves before absorbing naturally back into the earth. The Istituto degli Innocenti will be an incubator for the multiple interpretations of ‘Transition’ with fashion, film and performance placed in critical dialogue, in which audiences are invited to partake”, Lucy Orta, Artist and Chair of Art and the Environment, University of the Arts London.  

Image: Istituto Europeo di Design

The artist met with Fashion Design students yesterday at the IED Firenze seat in Palazzo Pucci N6 to initiate reflection on the theme of transition and at the same time translate it into a work that enhances the Brunelleschi Hall of the Istituto degli Innocenti as an exhibition space where the research of art meets the reflection of fashion. Students are called upon to decode the term transition understood as a moment passing and the complexity that every change entails. Every transition is the consequence of a need to adapt to a crisis that at the same time allows a different future to be planned, every transition is a search and in part a compromise.

The installation will be choral and the proposed objects, conceived through the forms and tools of critical contemporary design research, that increasingly intersect with the territory of fashion production, will make up a coherent whole.

“With this installation we also want to create an opportunity to reflect on the path that leads from the condition of youth to that of adulthood, that process of transition that “invades” every student during their years of study, and in this scenario the role of the school as an instrument of awareness is increasingly central”, says Danilo Venturi, IED Firenze Director.

The collaboration with the Istituto degli Innocenti as the venue for the installation underlines the focus on major human and social issues, a common ground of the IED's educational mission, a school, and a place of critical production in constant dialogue with institutions. Furthermore, it is also an incubator of ideas and processes to be developed as well as presented on occasions of international comparison with the fashion industry such as Pitti.

IED
Istituto Europeo di Design
Lucy Orta
Pitti Uomo