By Rebecca Ceccatelli. Cover image: photographs by Gabriele Busi.
Tangling. Untangling. Using and Reusing. The Florence campus opened its doors on Saturday, the 2nd of December, in an unexpected exchange of ideas and projects, all fruit of the creative minds of Marangoni students. This is the prove how creative ways to use school facilities open up our minds.
Interested in discovering how the school facilities have been turned into new temporary environments? Take a look at what happened!
Istituto Marangoni Firenze recently started the third edition of a new tradition at our campus – an open day for students, this time titled “School Unplugged: a non-academic Saturday”.
You might think that spending an otherwise relaxing Saturday afternoon at school, especially in the middle of the coldest month of the year, is the last thing you’d want after already spending hours there during the week. However, when you learn that you have the opportunity to reinvent school materials to transform classrooms and laboratories, giving them a new life, then you might actually change your mind. And that’s exactly what happened. Here’s a glimpse of the most original and inspiring activities we found during the event.
Let’s try creative ways to use school facilites and …It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!
The only thing that doesn’t freeze during the coldest month of the year is Marangoni’s creative spirit, warmed by the arrival of a much-loved and sometimes-hated winter festivity – Christmas.
We managed to strike a balance between Grinches and Santa’s elves to give an authentic and site-specific touch to the school’s reception area for the holidays. Our solution was to decorate a Christmas with personal accessories, up-cycled materials, Polaroids, and some wholesome decorative baubles and lights. The result was a veritable artwork that captured the essence of Istituto Marangoni. It’s definitely worth checking out!
Creative use of school facilities let us mastering the Art of Expression
With a brush in hand and a variety of colours to choose from, what would you do if you found yourself holding painting tools and a large, blank canvas to fill? Put some music and free your mind! Artists or not, twisting different fields has always proven to be a good collaborative exchange as a source of new ideas and exciting inspirations.
Somehow, the art studio has been taken over in a proper shareable, live painting performance. Pink tangles, yellowish interruptions, and contrasting shades of blue invaded the canvas, transforming it into urban graffiti, complete with personal signatures and tags. Who knows if the artwork will be hung in the lab or become only a tangible testament to an inherently ephemeral experience?
Evergreen rhymes with fanzine!
The creation of our third fanzine issue is an experience we simply couldn’t afford to miss out on. It’s a magazine with a purely graphic appearance achieved through the sole use of images assembled in a Dadaist act. We cut out excerpts from magazines, tear and assemble them in unusual compositions to create collages that become the central element of the fanzine. The only text present is made of a cut-up of letters and words placed, if deemed necessary, to accompany, explain, or complement each juxtaposition of images. The result is a burst of colourful creativity, with hands intertwining, faces made out of elements from different worlds, and a way of creating something new from existing materials.
Free the classes and school facilities with a fabric giveaway
As a fashion student, have you ever struggled to find the right fabrics for your project? Istituto Marangoni, being a fashion school, has seen countless types of fashion coming in and out of its labs – so many that some of these fabrics have been forgotten and left unused in the school’s drawers.
To reuse these forgotten materials, the school has decided to give them away for free during a ‘fabric giveaway’ so that they can provide inspiration and open up new possibilities for students to create something unique.
