Artigianato e Palazzo 2019 - 25th edition
Project location: Italy, Florence
Project start date: May 2019 -
Project end date: May 2019
Project number: 2018-030
Beneficiary: Associazione Giardino Corsini
The Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation has awarded a grant for this project:
16/17/18/19 MAY 2019
ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO:
CELEBRATES ITS "VERMEIL ANNIVERSARY"
25 YEARS OF PROMOTING AWARENESS OF THE VALUE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP
ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO has been running for 25 years now, and celebrates its "vermeil" anniversary, paying tribute to the refined technique of gilding silver with gold, which originated in France in the mid-18th century.
An important milestone for the exhibition promoted and organised by the cultural association Associazione Giardino Corsini, a reference point for the sector, an opportunity for exchanging views and ideas, developed from a project by Giorgiana Corsini and Neri Torrigiani to promote the principle of craftsmanship as a value.
"Twenty-five years protecting the traditional arts and trades linked to craftsmanship, in order to ensure that the heritage of our region will not be wasted but will be transformed into life blood and employment opportunities for the younger generations."
Traditional artisans are facing various difficulties such as the competition with low quality products and young people tend to prefer higher education rather than manual labor. Therefore it is important to preserve handicraft by helping artisans find new audiences and connect to young people. This aim aligns with the Foundation’s commitment of promotion of culture and the arts.
Throughout the exhibition, visitors discover how artisans create their objects by hand by watching them work in small workshops erected in the garden and orangeries. Every year organizers select approximately one hundred artisans who are the focal point of the event, most of them from Tuscany, but also many other areas of Italy and even abroad. In addition to its importance as a cultural event to popularize crafts, the exhibition offers an opportunity to take a closer look at “applied arts” in order to bring them into our daily lives and set this event apart from more traditional craft shows and fairs. Every year, a “Mostra Principe”, or Main Exhibition, is organized as part of ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO. It spotlights a business (or cultural entity, museum, etc.) that began as an artisan activity to become successful on an international level. It is an “exhibition within the exhibition” offering a special creative itinerary that has been acclaimed at the highest levels and which acts as a beacon for the other exhibitors. By bringing together an ever-larger group of master craftspeople, we hope with the ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO project to galvanize the attention of a broad-based audience open to these issues with the full interest and involvement of the protagonists involved: the artisans and their clients.
In addition to the main initiative of ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO there exists two sub-initiatives, BLOGS&CRAFTS I giovani artigiani e il web and RICETTE DI FAMIGLIA, both started in 2014 in celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the exhibition, with the goal of giving the exhibition a more modern perspective.
BLOGS&CRAFTS, is an initiative begun by the ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO exhibition committee that seeks to increase youth engagement in the event. In order to do so, the initiative creates opportunities for bloggers and traditional young artisans to have mutually beneficial exchanges of content and coverage. As part of this opportunity a select committee will choose 10 artisans under the age of 35 who will have the opportunity to freely exhibit their work during ARTIGIANATO E PALAZZO.
In addition, a group of bloggers in fields such as artisanal crafts, lifestyle, fashion, food and tourism will be selected and invited to the exhibition where they will be asked to live blog the event and write posts about their experience.
RICETTE DI FAMIGLIA (“Family Recipes”), the creation of food writer and tv-journalist Annamaria Tossani, is focused on the culinary artisan tradition of Italy. It’s seeks to promote the close ties between contemporary food culture and that of old family recipes and traditional wisdom. In order to do so, there are daily talk as well as show-cooking by famous chefs who offer their own versions of “old” recipes by giving them modern spin.
