Kings' Trinacria at Cabinet, Milan, Contrasts with Castiglioni

On October 5, 2018, the Triennale in Milan opened a major monographic exhibition for Achille Castiglioni's centenary, drawing hundreds of designers and architects. That same evening, a smaller group attended the opening of 'Kings. Trinacria' at Cabinet, a curatorial space founded by Maria Chiara Valacchi in 2010. The Kings, a collective founded in 2000 by Federica Perazzoli and Daniele Innamorato, presented a compressed domestic version of ten monumental posters (6x3 meters) originally installed in Palermo during Manifesta 12. The duo's work, like Castiglioni's, employs a '1+1+1' ready-made approach, assembling found objects and iconographic images of Sicily. However, while Castiglioni's designs (e.g., Toio lamp, Mezzadro stool) project a linear, futuristic bricolage, the Kings' neo-18th-century collages and wallpapers convey a circular, dreamlike impossibility of moving beyond past imaginaries.