The exhibition Fantasy Access Code (Codice di Avviamento Fantastico) curated by Davide Quadrio and Fantom’s Massimo Torrigiani, produced by Alcantara and first presented in the Apartment of the Prince of Palazzo Reale, Milan, has travelled to the K11 Art Museum from 22 June until 31 August 2017.

The five international artists called upon to take part in this mission are: Aki Kondo, Soundwalk Collective, Georgina Starr, Nanda Vigo and Lorenzo Vitturi. Each of them has come to terms with the evocations inspired by the Apartment of the Prince, which, like a creative device, has given rise to the creation of highly original works, all produced using the Alcantara material. The outcome is a choral work, both multi-faceted and unitary, put together as a series of ‘cabinets of curiosities’. A surprising explosion of past and future, of images and experiences.

In the K11 Art Museum, the original venue will appear only as an echo as the works commissioned and realized in Milan will be shown in a new configuration, creating an even more magical and allusive atmosphere.

The title in Italian, Codice di avviamento fantastico, refers to the mechanism of the same name as described by Gianni Rodari (1920 – 1980) in his booklet The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1996; first published 1973). The author explains how to set up a self-sustaining chain of ideas, associations of marvellous images and views to construct literary texts. In the same way, the exhibition itinerary is structured like a cosmology of amazing worlds arising from the direct relationship with the spaces. Each room constitutes a stop-off point along the imaginary journey undertaken by each artist, but also a starting point for the imagination of each and every visitor to these spaces – normally closed to the public – letting them enter parallel worlds, casting their gaze beyond the threshold and thus overcoming the limit between reality and imagination.

Visitors will be led along a path suited to all: adults, children, art experts and the merely curious. The exhibition goes from the spaceship by Nanda Vigo, via the garden created by Aki Kondo, the audio itinerary through the world of Alcantara by the Soundwalk Collective, only for the journey to then set off once more through the psychedelic forest of Lorenzo Vitturi and blast back to the past in Georgina Starr’s time machine.

“The buildings are alive. They have character and memory. They tell the stories of those who built them, lived in them, loved them and hated them. They withhold dreams and desires. They are thresholds for the imagination of worlds, of the past or ones that have never existed. Alcantara comes up with new things to extract the extraordinary from the everyday, from what is most familiar to us, and what is more extraordinary than moving  a piece of Milan to Shanghai? ” is the comment of the exhibition curators Massimo Torrigiani and Davide Quadrio.

Fantasy Access Code 
From June 22 to August 31, 2017 
K11 Art Museum, Shanghai
www.K11.com
www.alcantara.com