A Beautiful place is the factory, which is defined as beautiful because it can generate and inspire beauty.
The relationship between these two realities is deep, indeed “even intrinsic”, as the philosopher and theologian Vito Mancuso argues in his essay, which opens the Pirelli Annual Report 2021, because “manufacturing and beauty, or the economy and aesthetics, are related through a fundamental element for both of them: materials”. And the transformation of material generates products and works of art, productivity and splendour, thanks to the hands of man, because the factory and art are primarily about “manufacturing”.
To underline this connection, we asked artists to visit some of our production plants in China, the United States, Romania, Brazil and Italy and allow themselves to be inspired by the architecture, the technology, the people and the sounds they encountered to create their works, made of material and genius.
The hands of the Chinese engraver Tu Yonghong carved the paper with precision to the nearest centimetre, inspired by the sense of innovation and tradition felt at the factory in Yanzhou. Gestures and movements similar to those of a scrawler, as he uses his hands to create the prototype of a tyre, a unique work, carving out in the rubber the tread design that the computer created virtually.
Lisette Correa, a U.S. street artist, painted with spray paint and brushes two walls of the factory in Rome, Georgia, where the men and women who work there stand out in the foreground, smiling and united. “Because – as Mancuso argues – for the manufacturing plant to become truly resplendent with authentic beauty, it needs to be fed by the even more necessary beauty of those human relationships”.
The shapes and the architecture of the Settimo Torinese factory (Italy) are what inspired the potter Govanni Mengoni, who used his hands to shape a pot according to the Etruscan bucchero ware technique at the lathe. The sounds and the technology of the factories in Slatina (Romania) and Campinas (Brazil) instead inspired the music and texts of the cellist Andrei Cavassi and the Brazilian collective comprising Susy Garcia, Pinguim, Fernanda Broggi and Tony Felix.
Also combining the concept of manufacturing and creative beauty is the story of Ghana and Armenian-American writer Nadia Owusu, who recalls a game of construction and imagination capable of nurturing the mind, called factory, which she used to play with her sister when she was little.
Besides, Mancuso is equally convinced that the contact between manufacturing and beauty is essential to ensuring that our minds are not reduced to mechanical minds but remain human, that is to say free and creative.
