De Castelli

On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2024, HoperAperta, a project that combines Art, Architecture and Design, now in its sixth edition, presents the exhibition MIMESIS Forma Immagine, scheduled from 15 to 21 April in the heart of the fashion district.

 A space in Via Sant’Andrea, dedicated to the Mimesis project, will reveal itself, room after room, in the elegance of an aristocratic Milanese interior.

 MIMESIS is an exhibition with different passions, involving multiple players,

and among them ‘Institute of Technology of New York, Department of Architecture and Design, already a partner of HoperAperta in 2022 and 2023. The exhibition is based – like the events recently held in Milan, Genoa, Barcelona (ES), Soglio (CH) – on a dialogue between a variety of disciplines, creating a synergistic relationship between performers of the Milanese art scene.

 Paraphrasing Plato’s Republic, it could be argued that any object designed, imagined or realised, however reproduced in an image with different potential uses, presupposes three different degrees of approximation: a point of relationship, a point of transformation, a point of representation. An ideal form, completely independent of its functions, constitutes a first point of Mimesis.

Mimesis thus indicates a process of identification, a symbiotic action between two image-forms of different natures. For example, Mimesis can be generated in the spatio-temporal relationship of an object, rather than in the relationship between light and movement or finally in the relationship that is created between the object-image and its ideal staging through different forms of theatricality. The staging of the object, the idea of theatre produced through an active imaginary, goes beyond its practical function and is transformed into a work of art, a work conceived as the dramatisation of an idea, a process of synthesis that we could define as form/image.