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Communicating through Artistic Set-ups: The Experience of Colletta di Castebianco by Fernando Salvetti and Barbara Bertagni
The artistic set-ups constitute an efficient form of communication, involving an innovative modality of communication and management of the image of a company or of a territory. To fit out a space means to create a climate, generate a frame favoring and stimulating the reflection and confrontation, to metacommunicate values and vision, to surprise with a captivating management of the picture, to involve not only at a cognitive level, but also at an emotional level. To fit out a target is to draw attention and interest, to communicate, to amaze, to involve, to welcome, to invite and to reflect at a strictly cognitive level the discovery proceeding through imaginative thought. The fit outs are usually realized within the organizations: -
As an inner communication instrument in order to catalyze the attention on themes requiring a strong involvement such as knowledge management, change management, the development of leadership models, the motivation processes, the total quality, intercultural management and the internationalization processes.
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As an external communication instrument for interfacing with interlocutors in an original and involving manner.
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In order to promote particularly prominent projects.
The utilized instruments: scenography, projections, plays of light, art pictures, cartoons, photographs, short written texts, sculptures, suggestions of music and colors and literary and poetic hints. Each fit out is designed to measure, starting from a careful analysis of the client’s organization, his tacit and explicit culture, the customs and myths characterizing his history, the shared paradigms and the changes being made, the targets to be reached and the person it is aimed at. Each fit out is individual and can be provisional or of a longer duration.
1. Case: The setting up of the medieval village of Colletta di Castelbianco Colletta di Castelbianco is quite a charming medieval village: a bunch of stone houses with colored windows, castled in the Ligurian hinterland of Albenga (SV) in a thick cobweb of alleys and “carrugi� (typical Ligurian narrow streets). Restored lately by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo and entirely cabled, the village presents an ancient heart with a hyper-technological soul. The initiative belongs to an ample project of territorial marketing:
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In order to promote the image of the village as a place for reflection and research.
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In order to communicate the choice of investing in Colletta as a village dedicated to training.
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In order to bring out the landscape and the architecture as well as its high technological potentiality.
The difficulty was in being able to involve a much differentiated target of people with an initiative that utilized the language of training, but remained lucid and amusing at the same time. The firm that runs the village of Colletta has been chosen as a consulting firm Logos Knowledge Network which has fitted out the village and transformed, for one day, the whole little town into a magic labyrinth straight out of theatrical suggestions, music, colors, pictures and works of art, poems, philosophical meditations, light and shade, mirrors, optical illusions, perfumes and flavors, plays, ability tests and problem solving. A way of discovery sanctioned by Proust’s phrase “The true discovery of travel does not consist in discovering new lands, but to have new eyes.” The fit out was focused on mechanisms of imagination and representations characterizing the evolving research on oneself, to remind us of the fact that Colletta is a laboratory where different ways to see and reconstruct the world are sought, and new ways of doing things, to produce and plan, communicate and develop personal competences happen. The whole fit out has been realized by combining reality and representation together: passing between actual objects and painted objects, more or less real identities and pictures reflected by mirrors, conjuringtricks and optical illusions. A fit out has many physical and mental levels with incitation and suggestions intersecting with as many levels of the village as possible, almost like climbing the stairs appearing in the famous Escher’s opera (in the fitting out it is proposed under the shape of a huge puzzle to be built as a group). Many hundreds of visitors have penetrated the labyrinth of the lanes of Colletta, under a gallery of pictures in the open air, challenged by scornful puzzles, enraptured by the dialogues with the poet, incited to reflect, also through psychological plays, on the many levels of the reality that our eyes do not know or always perceive, searching the inner polyphony that exists even by means of psychological games, on numerous levels of reality, that our eyes cannot always catch, looking for an internal polyphony that inhabits us. As a background: a piano, violoncello, saxophone, contrabass and a voice reciting: Pessoa: “My soul is a mysterious orchestra; I don’t know what instruments play and squeal it.”