Bartes, Bar-Arte-Est, a public venue as an architecture installation

Bartes
Bar Art East, Interior Design as temporary installation

Year of design: 2017
Place: Ancona
Project: Arch. Simone Subissati
Collaborators: Nicoletta Mosca, Arch. Stefania De Chirico
Graphic design: Marzia Luchetti
Photo: Roberto Piccinni

An assignment for setting up a public venue can become an opportunity to deal with the theme of interior design as if it were an installation, an architecture with its own content and form and ideas connected to itself. The intent is to depart radically from the way of treating such a discipline still as furnishing or as the application of a style. Moving from the synthesis of Bar-Arte-Est (hence the name Bartes) in order to emphasise the vocation of Ancona as a Balkan link, the theme expands on one side to represent the feeling of the Adriatic or even more Mediterranean “koinè” and on the other one to imagine a society not made of space and buildings, but rather of places, occasions (even temporary) of relationships, of surfaces, which describe a fluid, transferable, light and temporary component that can remain an undetermined potential, putting together rather vague functionalities and great interpersonal skills. As in the nomadic dwellings, in the light and temporary structures of the suburban enclaves or in the popular spontaneous architecture, a skin well distinct from the building envelope - made of light metallic elements - covers the ceiling and the walls, creating a dialectic between subject-background, first-floor - second floor, diaphragm-solid space behind. The resulting vacuum is important as a dissolution of what usually tends to occupy in a stable, immobilizing manner.
The graphic intervention of the artist Marzia Luchetti which can be read at the end as the landing of a speech, becomes one with the metal and is conceived as a set of fragments, of mosaic tiles interchangeable with each other, a code made of signs, symbols and figures to create an imaginary - like a sort of synthesis work - of the evoked cultural scenario.
The white light highlights the limit - at the bottom - of the intervention, as detachment and solution of the same. The RGB LED light that filters through the panel system is instead changeable: more present and persistent or light and flexible or closed alone in white light depending on the occasions and times of the day.
The load-bearing structures and the deliberately exposed wiring almost like a work by Merz are part of the installation, in which technological language and linguistic poetry of Luchetti's signs dialogue and merge at times.