DISCO GUFRAM
Milan, 04 / 2018
Truly embedded in the historical pieces that the company has always presented in its trilling and colorful catalogues since the tumultuous and fascinating times of Italian Radical Design, this year Gufram makes everybody dance at Disco Gufram, its own visionary disco. Yes, please come and enjoy this ultimate extravaganza by Charley Vezza – owner, soul of Gufram and a master himself in enjoying life – and check how a symbolic place as the discotheque, a space so intertwined with our pop culture since the mid 1960’s, can be re-thought, re-shaped by contemporary objects, to combine past and present.
Back in the days, Gufram produced an entire collection of extravagant seating for what we call today “the spaces of freedom”, and for this new adventure has invited three groups of creative minds – Italian Atelier Biagetti (Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldessarri), Dutch ROTGANZEN (Robin Stam and Joeri Horstink) and French GGSV (Gaëlle Gabillet & Stéphane Villard) – to create its own surreal disco, in the heart of Milan.
Atelier Biagetti has been asked to interpret the just mentioned Gufram past collection of upholstered disco seats; by researching the archives of the company, and possibly pleasantly spending some few nights out at different clubs (a pleasant way to examine the subject), Laura and Alberto have reshaped some small couches with the special force and vigorous stamina.
Being stirred by the Gufram collection from the late ‘70s titled Linea Discoteca – bearing already fancy names – the duo restyled five different seats, which from the dance floor can easily come to rock and inhabit your house. They are Betsy, Tony, Stanley, Jimmy and Charly.
"Each piece is conceived as a person with a precise attitude, a sense of humour, a beauty, also some vices and dreams that get wild during the night”.
Laura and Alberto were “immediately inspired by the names of the original sofas, which identified them precisely as giving them a precise identity; they remind us of some real and living characters with whom you can interact. We decided to let them totally influence us, giving them a second life. Each piece is conceived as a person with a precise attitude, a sense of humour, a beauty, also some vices and dreams that get wild during the night”.
The designers intended to stick to the original past collection but with a contemporary wind, as we are not talking about vintage objects but just about the possibility to bring home with you a piece of your favourite discotheque.
Every disco has to have a mesmerizing dance floor, so Gufram invited the Parisian based GGSV – Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard – to conceive a compilation of carpets to do the trick; Dance Floor draws inspirations from the geometry of dance floors with the ambitious mission to make you dance within your own walls. They are magical! Try them and see what could be the result. Offered in different bright colors and shapes – circular, long and thin ones all with rounded edges, they come in orange, pink, purple and black – you can have fun in combining them so that you can add a creative twist to your floor.
“The Dance Floor rug is the encounter of a striped font and a podium under a neon light, so that you are the King of the divan”, says Gaëlle and Stéphane on their collaboration with Gufram:
“Ooh, I feel love,
I feel love,
I feel love,
I feel love,
I feel love’
... just like Donna and Giorgio, we share with this company the love to play”.
And when the party is over and it is time to go home, even the furniture let itself go a little. ROTGANZEN is a pop art design studio from The Netherlands, founded in 2009. Born and raised in the suburbs of Rotterdam, Robin and Joeri developed a sense to create something extraordinary out of the ordinary. They alter the appearance and context of everyday objects by investigating their core essence, making connections and searching for contradictions. By doing so they are able to create works full of contrasts, visually as well as conceptually, never committing to a single material or style.
After Party comprises three cabinets and two coffee-tables and represents a melancholic reminder to the temporary nature of glamour. The blown traditional and iconic disco ball has been modified as it would finally rest and recover after spending a long night out.
ROTGANZEN’s sense about this collection consists in a “visual metaphor of fading glory as we can see in the frozen blobs of amorphous shapes, covered by a carefully arranged glittering skin, composed of fragmented mirror. What once was a perfect shape takes on new character and meaning. However, rather than a doomed take on reality, the intention is to offer a playful image of past glory”.
With Disco Gufram the Italian brand pushes the limits of furniture to offer us an energetic, kaleidoscopic, and enthusiastic experience. With Disco Gufram, every floor can be a dance floor and every room can be a ball room.
