Memories for the Future

With Pirelli We Learn to... REMEMBER

The Pirelli Foundation is home to an extraordinary wealth of documents that have fascinating tales to tell of individuals, places, objects, and products. They also enable us to examine pivotal moments both in our history and in our present-day world. Photographs, drawings, posters, letters and films let us retrace the transformations of Pirelli, the first company in Italy to produce rubber. Now with over 150 years of history, the company looks steadfastly to the future.

ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
First, we explore the exhibition spaces of the Pirelli Foundation, with its Historical Archive, and we take time to examine some of the artefacts we come across in the exhibition. These are works created by the artists, photographers, graphic designers and engineers who have worked with Pirelli. This will show us various aspects of the company’s history: the large photographic portrait of workers by Luca Comerio, a pioneer of Italian cinema, will show us what life was like inside a factory in the early twentieth century, the preparatory cartoon for a mosaic by the artist Renato Guttuso, and Carlo Furgeri Gilbert’s photographs, which take us inside the Research and Development laboratories, while animated commercials will show us how many amazing objects can be made with rubber. During the visit, the children will also leave a trace of their own: they will be invited to create a new document in the form of a scrapbook, as a creative personal testimony of their experience during the visit. Images, thoughts, clippings and drawings all made into a small book of memories to be handed on to the young people of tomorrow.

OBJECTIVES
The aim is to explain what a historical archive is, what sources are, what they are for and how to explore them, in order to understand the importance of their role as repositories of memory and sources of inspiration for the future. This practical activity will also nurture the children’s manual and creative abilities and their ability to grasp the essentials.

This is an in-person event.