The exhibition will be inaugurated on August 24 at the CLB Art Gallery in Berlin “The Olivetti Universe. Community as a concrete utopia”. Prepared by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation, the exhibition promises to be a major event in the autumn recovery. It will remain open until 25 September and is a tribute – even more so – to a great Italian industrialist and patron of the arts. The man – endowed with extraordinary resources, an engineer at the Turin Polytechnic – who was the first in Italy to be able to express and realize an idea of work, society and the environment. All together.
The concept of community, linked to its history, unknown to the large industry of our country, grew thanks to an organic vision between places, profit, innovation, democracy, sociality. Were Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960) still alive today, he would witness a slow but tormented realization of some of his principles. In Ivrea, his headquarters, he knew how to surround himself with intellectuals and scholars capable of instilling in the nascent post-war capitalism a civil, progressive thrust, regarded, however, with suspicion by the other captains of industry. Men, capital and patents were managed on both sides, but Olivetti was confronted with intellectuals of the caliber of Franco Fortini, Geno Pampaloni, Paolo Volponi, Ottiero Ottieri. Names that perhaps say little to young people, but which in the post-war years represented the advanced point of writing and research inside and outside the factories. In the 80s and 90s their works inspired us to explore the paths of emancipation declined with knowledge and sacrifices. When the patron of office machines was gone and the Americans were selling their first personal computers.
From a small town far from the centers of Christian Democrat political power, with galloping and assisted finance, a united and concretely political Europe had been imagined. Olivetti followed Altiero Spinelli's project without dislocating himself from the Region known for having had the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, the Savoys, for having conquered the Italians with the myth of the automobile and a new mobility. The territorial horizon of the factory, of its employees, of social peace, of a wealth distributed without damaging men and things, in the end it was Olivetti's greatest legacy. Berlin will present it naked. Updating its stature, we would also define Olivetti as a green manager, a forerunner of an innovative circular economy that creates without destroying. Isn't such a man who thinks about producing but also about protecting the "producers"? The Marxist dichotomy exploited and exploiters overcome by the bond of community. And not only because the engineer associates typewriters, cultural encounters, civil passion with urban, environmental and human suggestions, but because he was attentive and curious. Everything that will be exhibited has accompanied his existence, often ignored by the industrial culture. In short, such an original character as to be spied on by the CIA: a resolute person even when he entered Parliament as a deputy.
The German Exhibition is divided into four sections (City and Politics, Factory, Culture and Image, Society). A gallery of graphics, documents, reproductions and photographic reinterpretations that stimulate reflections and current events on a unique figure in the Italian socio-political panorama. Some posthumous recognition was not lacking. To the point that Unesco has included Ivrea in the World Heritage list as a single integrated model of city-family-territory. Yes, but between the thirties and sixties of the twentieth century. Everything is skilfully represented at the CLB: the industrial project, attention to the territory, welfare, social responsibility and urban planning. An authentic exhibition that reminds us how certain men survive their time so well that they are surprisingly modern.
