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Modern Stories_27 02 4 .indd 2-3
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WORDS
STEFANO SALIS
Modernity is a fascinating word: try saying it out loud, or letting it roll around your mouth. Modernity seduces and gratifies the senses;
it always conveys a sense of tangible well-being. It reminds us that we live our time with enthusiasm, but also that we can surpass it—as lead
actors. In fact, “modern” stands in direct opposition to antiquated and old. Bringing with it a sense of youthfulness of ideas and outcomes,
its purpose is to see beyond the familiar horizon. It maintains a constant positive sensation. Yet, for this very reason, it is not a word to use
lightly. Hardly a cure-all, it brokers no fakes: it is no use pretending to be modern or innovative. Either you are or you aren’t.
Modernity is not a word, it is an attitude, an outlook. Modernity is a project of great breadth and lengthy unfolding: a collective and
individual transformation that materializes as it takes place. There are therefore no marked trails, only experiments to try and paths to follow
with a growing (collective and individual) consciousness, and with the new demands that the era places on designers and on the fabricators
charged with the task of making them reality. Modernity is culture. It is a tool for knowing and living that continually interrogates our way of being.
Modernity expresses itself through a rainbow of iridescent ideas: ideas that reveal the fallacy of the doomsayers (ever ready to
predict catastrophes) and identify paths that went awry, nudging them in the right direction. To bring this concept into the design world, if we
consider it no longer sustainable to plan and produce according to old models, materials, and principles—to use oft-maligned plastic as an
example—we should not demonize techniques and products that, as with plastic on an industrial scale, enabled large swaths of the population
to finally gain access to prosperity and ease: one of the 20th century’s definitive legacies.
Three themes guide us in the following pages: the history of modernity as a concept (in Italy in particular), its specific manifestation
in the design world, and a glimpse of the future that awaits us. Giuseppe Lupo, Deyan Sudjic, and Maria Cristina Didero, undisputed experts
in the field, share what it means to think about these notions from their own perspective, drawing up a map of meaning to guide our
awareness.
If terms such as well-being, innovation, sustainability, but also confusion, misunderstanding, turning point, and change of course make their
way into these essays, they are evidence of the critical spirit that the concept demands: the very zest of the conversation.
For everyone who manufactures, buys, uses, and lives design (and not only design), the artifacts of this transformation provide a new
opportunity to reinterpret roles and destinies. For these individuals the word modernity should not seem unfitting.
Because modernization is not only made by speculating on the future, but also from memory and passion. It is grounded in respect for
things that are well-made, with quality and love of craft, which are timeless values. In the enduring attention to details. In mindfully surrounding
ourselves with objects that speak to our identity, or rather, that make it manifest.
In short, to be modern, to be “of our time,” has never been a matter of owning the latest tech gadgets. It is not smugly reaping the
rewards of scientific discoveries that up until a few decades ago were unimaginable. It is not being (falsely) social merely because of fashion’s
dictates. Being modern is having an attitude of understanding and empathy with what is around us, with what we need to belong in a context:
our own. The new ways of living that will certainly emerge are the great opportunity awaiting those who reckon with the aspects of today’s
social and cultural experience that demand different solutions for new problems and innovative solutions for those that resurface.
The great philosopher Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Liquid Modernity: “one feels free in so far as the imagination is not greater than one’s
actual desires, while neither of the two reaches beyond the ability to act.” Imagination, actual, ability to act, desire: we navigate within this stream
of words with the knowledge that yesterday’s limits are today’s realities, tomorrow’s possibilities are our desire to design, tirelessly, a new
vocabulary of words, things, and even people. These are the rites of a secular liturgy that speak to our spirit in surprising and authentic ways.
Modernity is not a destination, it is the road just ahead of us.
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