Universo Olivetti. Community as a Concrete Utopia.

The story of a family, the destiny of a community, the universal value

The Italian Cultural Institute of Sydney is particularly pleased to present the exhibition Universo Olivetti. Community as a concrete utopia, created by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI), in collaboration with the MAXXI Foundation and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation, and curated by Pippo Ciorra, Francesca Limana and Matilde Trevisani.

Created with the contribution of Olivetti SpA and Translated, Universo Olivetti is travelling the World thanks to the network of Italian Cultural Institutes abroad. Previous exhibitions were kept in Ekaterinburg, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, Alger, Doha, Bucharest, Athens, Beijing and Shenzhen. In Sydney — in a historically fitting arrangement — the exhibition will be on view at the building that Olivetti purchased in 1972 on William Street and that served as the company’s Australian headquarters until 1988.

The exhibition tells the story of the Olivetti project in all its aspects, dimensions and complexity, through four thematic areas: Factory, Culture and Image, City and Politics, Society. Through a gallery of graphics, archival documents, reproductions and photographic reinterpretations, the show returns to the pressing relevance of a figure such as Adriano Olivetti, as well as the unique and innovative business model created around Ivrea – a city recently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List – between the 1930s and 1960s.

The exhibition platform – characterized by a graphically accurate layout and great communicative impact – thus allows the international public to access the major themes that revolve around the Olivetti company: the industrial project, attention to the territory, cultural services, welfare, social responsibility and urban planning; a model of entrepreneurial action that still appears today, from every point of view, avant-garde and exemplary. An essential part of the exhibition is a photographic commission project, curated by Simona Antonacci, entrusted to four important Italian authors: Luca Campigotto, Claudio Gobbi, Francesco Mattuzzi, Valentina Vannicola. They were asked to interpret Ivrea and its heritage with the aim of linking research and the story of heritage with a future-oriented gaze. The materials of the exhibition come mainly from the archive of the Adriano Olivetti Foundation and the Olivetti Historical Archive Association as well as from other important archives: the Gianni Berengo Gardin Archive, the Gabetti and Isola Archive, the National Corporate Cinema Archive , Central State Archive, the Study Center and Communication Archive – CSAC, the Tecnologic@mente Laboratory-Museum of Ivrea – Natale Cappellaro Foundation, Rai Teche, Paolo Pintori Archive, Forma Foundation for Photography, Federico Patellani Archive. Founded in 1908 as a typewriter company and headquartered in Ivrea, near Turin, Olivetti is still today a manufacturer of electronic business products. It became famous for the meticulous attention it paid to the design of its products, through collaborations with notable architects and designers, over a nearly 60-year period starting in the late 1930s, ranging from its first commercial programmable desktop calculators, the Programma 101, introduced in 1964 — to the Olivetti Valentine typewriter of 1969, which won the Compasso d’Oro from Italy’s Association of Industrial Design (ADI) in 1970.