The Consulate General of Italy in Shanghai, together with the Italian Cultural Institute, promoted a conference on “Sustainability and Beauty: Can Design Save the World?” as part of Italian Design Day 2023, in which designer Aldo Cibic also took part.
In her speech the Consul General of Italy in Shanghai, Tiziana D’Angelo, emphasised that “Italian culture is not merely the legacy of the past, but is a concept that embraces our history, our lifestyle and the way we imagine the future. It is precisely the relationship between culture and manufacturing that is the distinguishing feature of Italian know-how, capable of combining the beauty and originality of design with the quality of raw materials and innovation. Italian design has always had the merit of creating objects that are beautiful but at the same time functional, keeping sustainability and the improvement of people’s lives at the centre”.
While introducing Cibic, the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Francesco D’Arelli, emphasised how the artist “with his changing and vivid imagination” handles “as in Renaissance workshops, the essential alphabet of shapes, colours and materials”. In his dialogue with design historian and critic Wang Shouzhi, Aldo Cibic finally said: “What I like most in my work is to experiment. I am increasingly amazed at how beauty manifests itself in the most diverse and unexpected forms in the projects in which I am involved”.
