MILAN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alcantara® continues its commitment to innovative and creative design with its support and encouragement of a wide variety of artistic endeavors in 2016.
The Alcantara Magic Hotel, for example, will be a feature of Milan Design Week 2016. Throughout the month of April the scaffolding of a building under renovation at Corso Como 8 will be covered by a giant 2D and 3D art installation in Alcantara designed to reproduce the facade of a real hotel. Every evening as the sun goes down, the Magic Hotel will come to life, thanks to a series of video mapping animations showing what happens inside the hotel.
Conceived and created by Gentucca Bini, the giant piece of artwork will be constructed from a special variant of Alcantara that uses photographic printing in ultra-high resolution to provide a high level of detail. Three-dimensional effects create an optical illusion that will surprise even the most careful observer.
The Magic Hotel is just one of several innovative displays and exhibits planned by Alcantara during the month of April in Milan.
The company will bring to Milan (Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia “Leonardo da Vinci”) Local Icons. East/West, the special exhibit created in partnership with MAXXI Museum in Rome, and two installations by Anton Alvarez and Formafantasma, utilizing Alcantara materials that contrast tradition and technology on the Palazzo Litta. In addition, the Mondadori megastore windows at Piazza Duomo and Via Marghera will be specially decorated in Alcantara as part of a new product launch by Microsoft.
In January, Alcantara and DAMN magazine collaborated to present Touching Tales during IMMCologne in Germany. The contemporary show invited four maverick studios to experiment with the Made-in-Italy trademark material to create displays for the Cologne event.
The Touching Tales of artists, Moritz Waldemeyer, Anton Alvarez and Formafantasma were displayed at the Kunsthaus Rhenania in the Rheinauhafen complex. An installation in Alcantara by Henrik Vibskov also was on display at the Cologne design fair.
Known for their ability to combine high-end technology with handmade materials, the artists and their four studios were given free rein to choose among the infinite colors and decorations offered by Alcantara to produce visions of the material and its values.
The Cologne displays were followed in February by an exhibition that employed iconic objects to interpret 10 cities in an imaginary dialog between east and west at MAXXI, Rome’s National Museum of the 21st Century Arts. Well-known designers experimented with Alcantara to produce a travel narrative in images and objects suggestive of Amsterdam, Paris, London, Vienna, Copenhagen, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei and Jakarta.
Alcantara took part in a February performance of the “Simon Boccanegra” by Giuseppe Verdi in Hong Kong by providing a new curtain for the opera inspired by 14th century decorations and faithful to an original sketch by Sylvano Bussotti. The new curtain was the first step in a partnership between Alcantara and Teatro Regio for an international cultural project during the 2016-2017 season.
Alcantara’s commitment to the arts also included participation at two international events late last year celebrating Italian-made excellence and creativity in Los Angeles. Alcantara was a partner of Cinema Italian Style 2015, a Los Angeles festival for Italian contemporary cinema produced by Luce Cinecittà and American Cinematheque. That was followed by Alcantara’s participation in Los Angeles of the American première of “Youth,” a film by Academy Award winning writer/director Paolo Sorrentino.
Alcantara S.p.A. - www.alcantara.com
Founded in 1972, Alcantara represents a prime example of Italian-produced quality. As registered trademark of Alcantara S.p.A. and result of a unique and proprietary technology, Alcantara® is a highly innovative material, offering an unrivalled combination of sensory, aesthetic and functional qualities. Thanks to its extraordinary versatility, Alcantara is the choice of leading brands in a number of application fields: fashion and accessories, automotive, interior design and home décor, consumer-electronics. These features, together with a serious and certified commitment in terms of sustainability, make Alcantara a true icon of contemporary lifestyle: the lifestyle of those who want to fully enjoy their everyday life, respecting the environment.
Since 2009 Alcantara is certified “Carbon Neutral”, having defined, reduced and offset all the CO2 emissions derived from its activity. To mark out the path of the company in such a field, every year Alcantara draws up and publishes its own Sustainability Report, certified by TÜV SÜD international authority and available also on the corporate website. Headquartered in Milan, Alcantara’s production site and R&D department are located in Nera Montoro, in the heart of Umbria Region (Terni).
