Fredrik Paulsen, Luca Cremona, Soft Baroque

Frederik Paulsen

During the Palazzo Monti artist residency, Fredrik Paulsen collected scrap material as souvenirs from the workshops they visited during the residency. By combining them with custom metal beams developed together with local artisans, he wanted to celebrate the ad-hoc furnishings often used on the workshop floor. The use of colour is based on the green doors and carpentry inside of the Palazzo Monti.

Soft Baroque

During the Etage Projects Summer Residency at the Palazzo Monti in july 2018, Soft Baroque created this series of Puffy Bricks, made by filling balloons with concrete and fitting them in a mold.

From mirrors that obscure your reflection with plumes of pleasantly scented mist to shelving units that can be downloaded to your computer desktop or installed in an office IRL, Soft Baroque’s unique designs are both comical and critical, at once underscoring our materialist consumer desires and our increasingly virtual experiences.

Ilaria Bianchi

During the period of residence, Ilaria was inspired by the structure, architectural and social fabric of the city of Brescia to develop a project that hybridizes sound design, photography and graphics. She then created Domestic Perimeters, a collection of limited-edition screens that reflect the multi-faceted complexity of the experience. Simultaneously, Sinead explored and represented local iconic places such as Lake Garda and Lake Como, the Brescia Castle, the locals, other artists in residence and the Director inside the Palazzo.

Wondering if architectural barriers can be transformed into spaces for domestic reflection, in Ilaria's screens the industrial profiles, used to produce gates, are expropriated of their function as an impassable barrier and rethought in the domestic environment as flexible portals.

The screen is the domestic object that most represents the division: a mobile line of clean separation, a screen between two worlds that must not meet. In a historical moment in which boundaries and barriers seem to strengthen, these perimeters want to cut out a dimension of intimacy that is not isolating, but mobile and communicating. More than a boundary line, a line of encounter. And so, the screens are placed in Palazzo Monti, a microcosm that lives on arrivals and feeds on differences, of experience, of origin.The screens were made of wrought iron by the family-run workshop in Brescia, Zoldan, with fabrics sublimated by AllOver, a small workshop in Milan, and sewn by Debo, a Nigerian tailor who opened his business in Brescia 7 years ago. New and old generations weave the creation of objects by connecting not only a physical space but a local community present on the territory.From light walls the Domestic Perimeters become portals, which separate two worlds but offer a passage full of synergies. An agile home barrier to break down mental barriers.

Luca Cremona

During the weeks of the lockdown everyone tried to tame their reality.

"We were all more or less in the same situation. There were those who had Netflix and those who scrounged it. I got a bit lost, I couldn't find myself, and consequently I couldn't grow. The vine plant basically has the same The carved wood allowed me to endure that period, but it was also the support to get me up.