Ufficio di revisione antropica, con Giancarlo Norese, 2012, Umberto Cavenago

Ufficio di revisione antropica, con Giancarlo Norese, 2012

Office supplies at the Suzzara Prize Gallery

(survey on Suzzara Prize)

Ufficio di revisione antropica

Ufficio di revisione antropica (indagine sul Premio Suzzara) is a work dedicated to the perception of the Prize, its reasons, its history and its identity in the territory of Suzzara.
It was created by Umberto Cavenago and Giancarlo Norese on the occasion of their participation in CASAMATTA, the 47th edition of the Suzzara Prize.
It was precisely from this territorial survey that the idea of designing the CM logo (Casamatta) comes to change the historic industrial brand of Officine Meccaniche. “This publication is an integral part of the project, together with the website www.premiosuzzara.it/ura, research in the archive of the Gallery of the Prize, video interviews, photographs, finds of books, documentaries, manuscripts, testimonies and miscellaneous materials.”

Umberto Cavenago e Giancarlo Norese

Cavenago - Norese

Umberto Cavenago and Giancarlo Norese conduct two individual artistic researches that appear very different from each other. Cavenago focuses his work on physical, mechanical interactions between space, form and function and on his interest in new media and digital technologies. Norese's work focuses more on relational dynamics and collaborative projects, often conducting real 'investigations' into landscape metaphors. In recent years, however, the two artists have developed a shared field of research, which has been articulated in a very articulate way in educational activities, publishing projects, exhibitions and territorial investigations. Precisely in relation to this dimension, Cavenago and Norese present Ufficio di revisione antropica (investigation into the Suzzara Prize), a work dedicated to the perception of the Prize, its reasons, history and identity in the Suzzara area. Hence, for example, the idea of designing the CASAMATTA logo, modifying the historical industrial trademark of the Officine Meccaniche.

CM, Casamatta. 47th Premio Suzzara 18 September/23 October 2011 (Cat.), A. Castiglioni, E. Zanella (ed.), Casamatta. 47th Premio Suzzara, Galleria del Premio Suzzara, Suzzara (MN). Galleria del Premio Suzzara, Suzzara - IT, Edizioni NuovaLitoEffe, Piacenza, 2011

OM - CM

The inventors of this logo, the artists Umberto Cavenago and Giancarlo Norese, after having studied our history in all its aspects, perform an operation that I would define as detournement: distraction and decontextualisation on something that we are used to seeing according to a certain form that is familiar to us, the OM trademark precisely. Another horizon of meaning opens up, evoking the first but displacing it elsewhere: "CM", or CASAMATTA, a fortified outpost with tasks of observation, defence and design.

CASAMATTA, paraphrasing a phrase by Debord in 1956, designs situations made to be experienced by its builders, who are the people of Suzanne with their history, i.e. nothing could be further from the 'public' of spectators, to whom every emotional reaction is extorted from the outside and the outsider. The "CM" logo, evocative, phantasmal, dialectical, critical, "subversive" in its expropriation, but also immediate, recalls that character of "simplicity" that Dino Villani, as an advertising theorist, invoked in the design of trademarks and that he put into action in the invention of the Suzzara Award, back in 1948 and that John Maeda in his 2006 book "The Laws of Simplicity" defines as follows: "Simplicity means subtracting the obvious and adding the significant". The 'O' subtracted through graphic tampering is transformed into 'C' without changing the original (typographic) character. We are not faced with an archaic, regressive, nostalgic image that takes refuge in a mythical past, but with an image that is the dawning of the new and the production of the original: this is where its originality lies.
"Which means locating the dialectical image as the place par excellence, where what really concerns us could be thought of in what we see" (Didi-Huberman).

Marco Panizza, 2012