Friday, January 29th, 12am, Art Fair Art First:
Michelangelo Pistoletto and Renato Stauffacher, AD Alias, present the works to the public.

The artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Juan E. Sandoval transform the Laleggera chair – by Riccardo Blumer for Alias  and Golden Compass in 1998 – into the boundary zone between land and sea, between art and design.
Art and design converge toward the same objective: to give sense and create value through a shared planning of a civil commitment.
The chairs are aligned around the geographical profile of the Mediterranean. Divided by the line of the coast they absorb the colours of both the water and the land. On the chairs the boundary does not divide but connects.The chairs, arranged to complete the outline of the Mediterranean Sea, form a complimentary work to the Love Difference Table by Pistoletto, dated 2003. There, the chairs represented the differences, and their arrangement around the mirror table represented hope and the invitation to dialogue. Here instead the work makes a further conceptual leap: the table exists only in the imagination and its dimensions depend on the positioning of the chairs. So it is use itself that defines widths and dimensions by moving the chairs for each occasion, in the hope that a minor telluric shift could move the fault lines that divide the various continents, bringing them closer and making the sharing of a future by respecting differences more simple. The same shape, different in the colours and the way the line of the coast divides them. The same like the essence of our collective destiny. Different, mirroring the soul of the individual seated in them.
The Mediterranean Sea is the point of departure for a planetary reflection on the concept of differences.
Pistoletto and Sandoval – as seen during the project for the University of Antwerp in 2005 – conduct
a wider reflection on all the Mediterraneans of our planet, extending the work to six cradles of differences, six
different surfaces on which to spread the artistic alphabet of the project Mediterranei – Love Difference chairs. Similar geographical conditions and cultural osmoses exist in many other parts of the world: the Baltic Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Caribbean Sea each in turn narrates meetings of civilizations, growth in respect of diversity, the desire to sit around a table to look at each other and discover how much we are the same and yet different.

All proceeds of selling the chairs will be donated to sustain the activity of Love Difference – Artistic Movement for an InterMediterranean Politic, an association working towards the creation of a network of cooperation powered by art and committed to promoting a culture of differences. Love Difference conducts research projects and spreads artistic methods for intercultural dialogue that valorise the creativity of the individual within the collective. In synergy with a range of associations present in the Mediterranean area, Love Difference realizes projects that involve local communities in artistic actions that reveal alternative points of view and stimulate processes of cultural growth.

Each chair is a unique work, signed by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Juan E. Sandoval. The total of 248 chairs delineate the profiles of the Mediterranean Sea, Baltic Sea, Caribbean Sea, Black Sea, Red Sea and South China Sea.
The selling price of a single chair is 2.500 euro + VAT.
+39 015 0991456 +393482117246
info@lovedifference.org
www.lovedifference.org