During the 2023 Milan Design Week, the IULM University Exhibition Hall will host several exclusive works of art from the Alcantara art archive.

Visioni Tattili (Tactile Visions), as the exhibition is called, retraces some of the steps that Alcantara has taken over the past ten years in co-producing artistic events all over the world, in constant dialogue with authors, curators and museum institutions. This fascinating story is told in ALCANTARA La materia dell'arte, published by Skira editore and edited by Luca Masia, which went on sale last December.

Two of the four works on display in the IULM Exhibition Hall were shown for the first time in 2019 at the De Coding exhibitioncurated by Domitilla Dardi and Angela Rui, which explored the qualities of Alcantara as a material for art and design, transforming the spaces of the Sale degli Arazzi of the Palazzo Reale in Milan into gateways to unusual exhibition concepts in terms of content and method of realisation.

Scylla, an immersive installation by Constance Guisset welcomes visitors and IULM students with an impromptu session. Ever since the 2019 exhibition, the work has amazed with its majesty and material appeal: the tapestries appeared to come to life, invading the space with fins and tentacles that gathered in the centre of the Palazzo Reale, and with the unique texture given by the use of Alcantara®, the appendages seemed to belong to some extraordinary chimeras.

With the installation Signs, Symbols and Scripts, now in the centre of the IULM hall, the Chinese artist QU LEI LEI invites visitors to help him create works inspired by the Chinese calligraphy tradition, using ancient pictograms, the collage technique and Alcantara as a medium.

Inspiration from the ancient art of calligraphy lies at the heart of the three other works Visioni Tattili brings to the IULM University Exhibition Hall. They were part of the exhibition OUT of the BLUE. Viaggio nella calligrafia attraverso Alcantara (Journey in Calligraphy through Alcantara), curated by Dagmar Carnevale Lavezzoli and Katie Hill, in 2020 at the Palazzo Reale.

For this exhibition, each of the artists was entrusted with one of the rooms of the Appartamento dei Principi, which were transformed into experiences through site-specific Alcantara installations, creating a dialogue with the aesthetics of the rooms through affinities and contrasts.

Zhang Chun Hong's work Fall creates a hybridisation that skilfully combines human and natural elements. Using his leitmotif of flowing hair finely painted in thin locks in the Gongbi 工笔 style, the artist creates a sculptural work that the viewer can enter. The installation evolves through light and shadow, the human body and the natural world, transforming the flowing lines of hair into a representation of flowing water. In traditional Chinese culture, hair is associated with life, evoking the ideas of temporality and continuity inherent in Buddhist thought. Combining the calligraphic line of the brush with the archetypal quality of traditional Chinese landscape painting, the waterfall is a vision in which nature, body and calligraphy become inseparable through the medium of Alcantara.

Finally, on the long sides of the IULM Exhibition Hall is the work Infinity of Temples by Qin Feng, which, realised through a technique similar to dripping, made up of sketches, traces and sprays, exploits the immediacy of action, presenting not an idea in the making, but the immediate forms of the idea itself.

Alcantara, an extraordinary material medium and a source of inspiration for artists and designers from all over the world, comes to the IULM University and its students with this exhibition, revealing its uniqueness and innate characteristics of functionality and aesthetic emotion.