2015 –

A few months ago, during a meeting with the great starred chef Roberto Petza, I had the idea of a food tapestry. A carpet made of Sardinian food from appetizers to desserts, prepared as a large and colored finger-food table. Roberto (I had already designed for him a typographic tapestry, a “typestry”), welcomed the project with enthusiasm. From this meeting came a performance that took place at the MAN in Nuoro, Sardinia’s most important museum for contemporary art, on June 26th. Roberto Petza cooked for ninety guests an extraordinary sequence of incredible flavors, then placing them with a remarkable graphic awareness. Framing Roberto’s work, four of my typographical tapestries were exhibited on the walls. For the occasion, I also designed the table with a trapezoidal section, a strong and white solid wood. The result was fantastic, both for the eyes and the palate. We will repeat this experience for the opening week of Sardinia all’Expo2015, in Milan, on September 11th.

In 2014/2015, at the University of Cagliari, I redesigned the coat of arms of the City of Cagliari.The achievement is the result of a philological approach, which has led some interesting surprises. The evolution of the shield over the centuries – from the first crest of Pisa, in which there was only the castle – has shown the rise of the quarter, first with the Aragona’s poles, and then with the royal Savoia’s cross. Versions appeared between the eighteenth and twentieth century, stabilized the figures of tritons on the sides, the castle emerging from the sea, algae and corals, and express a city open to the sea. The obvious relationship with other Baroque decorations drove me to think that the frame of the emblem is actually the progressive deformation of a shell. It is a symbol of protection and perfection: the coat of arms – and thus the city – as is contained in a casket. Finally, I have developed a version of the emblem that, on the one hand, it retains the properties Gestalt and vector of a modern brand; the other makes it more explicit the symbolic shape of the shell. The work was completed by the development of a user manual.