TEN YEARS OF ARTISTIC DIRECTION FOR THE UNITED NATIONS

The first project our office worked on was a traveling exhibition that brought the principles underpinning the Campaign to the squares of Europe. NO EXCUSE 2015 was an exhibition explaining the key concepts of the campaign, clarifying the importance of dialogue between different social realities. For this project, tubular steel structures, large totems, were created. These represented the alliance of eight children from rich countries and eight from poor countries whose stylized heads, joined together in a continuous series, served to signify the objectives to be achieved by 2015. The exhibition is designed to be accessible to all (children are more difficult to convince but also the most open to new perceptions), and, thus it can make anyone think in the most concrete terms about the importance of such an ambitious project. The images that cover the totems come to represent the Millenial objectives (MDGs) and for this reason they are positive and chromatically rich visions of a world in which diversity is at once a resource and a value. Three identical iterations of the exhibition have travelled around the world since 2003, and by now more than 120 million people have seen it.

Berlin, Leipzig, Erfurt, Tubingen, Mainz, Cottbus, Bremen, Hannover, Koln, Bonn, Luneburg, Lindau am Bodensee, Dusseldorf, Rostock, Stuttgart, Wuppertal, Bensheim, Heidelberg, Hamburg, Osnabrück, Barcelona, San Sebastian, Santiago de Compostela, Madrid, Bilbao, Sevilla, Albacete, Salamanca, Zaragoza, Milano, Firenze, Bastia Umbra, Roma, Macerata, Perugia, Bruxelles.

In recent years AR.CH.IT has designed and held many events and exhibitions for the United Nations including the Futurshow in Bologna, the Stand Up project, the Middle Campaign and others by overseeing organizational, graphic and mounting aspects.

The “Give Development a Chance: Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Needs Urgent Reform” project supervised by AR.CH.IT in 2010 is also singular and interesting. The project clearly explains the difficult work of synthesis regarding a complex issue that, nevertheless, resulted in a clear and straightforward image that was understandable by all.

Videos produced include: the 2007 Stand UP! Speak OUT!commercial in which instead of falling, a colored domino rises to form the Stand Up  logo, the 2010 video presented at the Match Against Poverty in Lisbon and produced using the kinetic typography animation technique, the “The Future We Want” video, created in stop motion by the video maker Virgilio Villoresi under the artistic direction of AR.CH.IT, which explains the meaning of sustainable development.