Skin Up

Concept

The interior design is intended to be the construction of a theatrical/architectural stage on which every user finds him or herself consciously playing his or her role, as both actor and audience member at the same time. In the actors’ “marquee” (the store), you are attracted by coloured lamps lined up with the simple playfulness of the lights of a fun fair. To enter, you must pass through a triple Palladian window (or “serliana”) that serves both as a door and a display window; it is the proscenium, which separates the external space of the city (the falsehood of the real) from the internal scenic space (the truthfulness of fiction).

Beyond the serliana, you are already on stage in the role of the astute shopkeeper, the blowhard customer, or the malicious shop assistant, in accordance with the finest tradition of the commedia dell’arte. The interior makes no secret of its falseness. A large mirror on the rear wall, artificially doubling the space, feigns a central-plan layout and non-existent symmetries. The rehearsal space, in the centre, is no more than a curtain that experiences the ephemeral sensation of being a little temple. The prima donna, playing the part of a beautiful lady, will enter to perform the purchase of a pair of crocodile shoes, climbing onto the small stage – complete with tympanum – to try them on, parading under the spotlights, aloof in front of the mirror. Her partner (perhaps playing the part of her lover) will sit down to applaud her softly in the amphitheatre of red acanthus leaves, under the severe gaze of the Medici Venus.

Applause. The actors have all been excellent.
She thanks with her eyes.
He pays.
The shop assistant wraps the purchase up in gift paper with golden string.
See you soon. The door closes.
Everyone home. The show is over.
Reflection behind the scenes: we have revisited history, but without contemplating it with reverential dread.
In tracing out, in reverse, the tortuous meanders of time, we found ourselves transforming those places (history) – which they had taught us to consider as the strict museum of hibernated ideologies – into our current, day-to-day,
future-proof studio.
It is the place in which Phidias, between shoots, comes to sit at our table on a capital that serves as a seat, to converse with Rauschenberg.
The Parthenon is over there, dismantled, in the warehouse of cast-off scenes.
Perhaps next season we’ll perform Palladio. (F.A.)

‍