Location: Online on Zoom and Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Ettore Sottsass. L’attività grafica. Una ricerca d’Archivio it’s the third event of the 2025–2026 academic year of ARCHiVe Online Academy, curated by Fiorella Bulegato and Marco Scotti with Sergio Menichelli.

The talk will focus on a less explored aspect of Ettore Sottsass’s figure and career: his work in the field of graphic design, examined in the forthcoming volume Ettore Sottsass. L’attività grafica. Una ricerca d’Archivio (2025), edited by Fiorella Bulegato and Marco Scotti. The authors will engage in dialogue with Sergio Menichelli, a visual designer who worked at Sottsass Associati in the 1990s and is a keen expert on Sottsass’s practice.
During the event, the research that led to the publication of the volume will be presented, promoted by IUAV University of Venice and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, where part of Ettore Sottsass Archive is preserved. Starting from the archive and relating materials, connections, and references to other collections and holdings, the lecturers will illustrate the path that led them to focus on Sottsass’s graphic design activity, probably the least known area within the vast body of work of the celebrated architect and designer. Menichelli’s perspective will offer the opportunity to delve into the architect’s graphic work from the viewpoint of someone who worked alongside him and experienced first-hand his personal design approach.

The lecture will be held in Italian.

Online and in-person lecture, part of the ARCHiVe Online Academy programme, curated by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler.

How can we understand the operations of technology and power in our era? Our technological systems are increasingly complex, interconnected, automated and opaque. The industrial transformations in AI are further concentrating power, while accelerating polarisation and alienation. But these forces are part of a longer set of trajectories. If we are to address the urgent challenges of the contemporary time – including climate catastrophe, colonial wars, and wealth inequality – we need to contend with the interwoven nature of their histories.

In this in-conversation lecture, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler will address how they explored these issues in Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500, their award-winning, large-scale artwork that tracks imperial systems over five centuries. By merging research and design, science and art, Joler and Crawford provoke us to go beyond the current spectacles of AI to ask how we got here—and consider where we might be going.

 

The lecture will be held in English.

Admission is free, subject to availability. Registration is required:
→ Register to attend the lecture online
→ Reserve your seat to attend in person