We have previously discussed HOKA and their collaboration with Nicole McLaughlin. Yesterday, the brand, a part of Deckers Brands, unveiled a new partnership with SATISFY. The HOKA model involved in this collaboration is the Clifton LS, which has now become the HOKA x SATISFY Clifton LS. This combination highlights the reliability and high-performance design of both brands.

SATISFY is a performance-oriented brand based in Paris with a mission to support runners in achieving increasingly higher results. The shoe born from the collaboration with HOKA stands out for its technical mesh inspired by topographic maps, ensuring perfect breathability along with a well-defined style. In short, it’s a perfect shoe for natural running and responsiveness, whether on the road or on trails. This is also thanks to the double heel strap combined with the intelligent quick lacing system, offering a comfortable fit reminiscent of climbing shoes. Additionally, the reflective toe protects the runner during night runs, and the Durabrasion rubber sole is ready to tackle any type of terrain with agility.

Available at a price of €225, the HOKA x SATISFY Clifton LS is ready for purchase on SatisfyRunning.com and HOKA.com, as well as at selected retailers worldwide.

In Como, while walking through the streets of the city center, you might come across Galleria Ramo. A blue light emanates from the back room, prompting curiosity about its nature. The storefront provides some ambiguous clues. A series of sculptural works reference an industrial and mechanical universe. These are the artworks of Venetian artist Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto. From an external viewpoint alone, there’s a visual contrast between the clean display of the first room, resembling a “white cube,” and the blue light in the background, emanating from small circularly arranged lights. We met with gallery owner Simon J.V. David and the artist to delve deeper into these artworks, which are as clean and intricate as they are challenging to interpret. The exhibition’s title, “Caìgo,” – open until December 3rd – gives an initial significant hint to the observer. The term is typical of the Venetian dialect and means “dense fog.” Masiero Sgrinzatto’s artistic exploration is closely tied to his origins, particularly with the provincial dimension, enveloped by fog, monotony, and the culture of labor. In other words, the artist focuses his investigation on the themes of toil and work, seen as an intrinsic moral imperative within the Venetian socio-cultural fabric. More specifically, the artist identifies the dimension of the village fair as an emblem of provincial everyday life and further emphasizes the carousel as an allegory of the surrounding reality.

Getting into specifics, Masiero Sgrinzatto’s installations and sculptures revolve around the concept of the carousel, its playful and structural function perceived by the artist as a perfect metaphor for a society dedicated to the culture of labor. «The carousel is afflicted, compelled to perform and fuel an ongoing game of losses, a round dance without an exit,» shares the artist, who reflects on the context of the village fair, a typical “container” for carousels and playful attractions. Here, it represents a “general condition of celebration and community in which, simultaneously, one perceives a line of tension, a contrast between forces that contribute to defining and emphasizing a hyperbolic and ambiguous environment.”

From a technical and material standpoint, the artist’s choice to utilize industrial scrap materials enhances the imagery he aims to create. In Edoardo Durante‘s critical text, the message is clear: “The appropriation of waste materials like residues from car tires, steel bars, electrical cables, brass cylinders inherently encapsulates a condition of constant failure.” His works are “machines in becoming, unable to fully express their potential, destined to exist within a precarious and contradictory dimension, much like that in which the contemporary individual lives.” In this regard, the words of Simon J.V. David succinctly encapsulate the artist’s intent: “Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto, through his artistic exploration, delves into the chaos of social interactions in village fairs, transforming provincial life into an intense stage for confrontation and dialogue. Sgrinzatto masterfully captures the struggle of the laborer to express their potential in a precarious context, offering a reflective gaze on daily life in the provinces.”

Courtesy Galleria Ramo and Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto
Ph credits Simon J.V. David

Graffiti Art in Prison is a project that originated in 2021 following an invitation extended to French artist David Mesguich by Professor Gabriella Cianciolo from the University of Cologne. The goal? To explore artistic expression within prison walls, creating a synergy between scientific research, educational activities, and social involvement. The project came to life within Sollicciano prison in Florence, an isolated space from the rest of the city, where a diverse group of artists, educators, and scholars dedicated themselves to challenging the boundaries of creativity and social perception by organizing a series of workshops with inmates. In 2022, a fortunate encounter between David Mesguich and American photographer Martha Cooper led to her involvement in the project from a documentary perspective.

«Our idea was to place art at the center of a dialogue between the past and the present, between often-forgotten individuals and the possibilities of redemption through artistic expression,» says David Mesguich. An intriguing aspect of the project is the involvement not only of inmates but also of prison guards. Thus, the project becomes a true social experiment that aimed to break down mental and cultural barriers. «We saw surprising human connections emerge between guards and inmates during an experience that transcended simple artistic creation,» says a representative from the prison administration involved in the project.

At the heart of GAP was the process of creating artworks that blended graffiti with large-scale installations. Not without obstacles, the project faced resistance from prison authorities. «We had to undergo lengthy negotiations to obtain permission for our installations, but we never stopped believing in the transformative power of art,» affirms David. The artworks created in Sollicciano prison, now dismantled, survive only through Martha Cooper’s photographs, precious testimonies of a moment when differences were erased, and creativity surpassed the confines of incarceration. «The images I captured within the prison are evidence of moments when the invisible barriers between individuals crumbled,» recounts Cooper, reflecting on her experience within the project.

Courtesy David Mesguich & Martha Cooper

A semi-dark room, curved aluminum walls and a large neon sun radiating the colors of dawn. This is the interdisciplinary installation Il Resto dell’Alba, created by artist Patrick Tuttofuoco (1974), in collaboration with Pininfarina Architettura, for the MAN in Nuoro. A subjective experience that, in the words of curator-museographer Maddalena D’Alfonso, “places the visitor at the center of what for us is one of the possible landscapes of art, where we move in search of ourselves.” A timeless and atypical dimension in which past, present and future coexist. Despite its form, which in terms of its realization may appear futuristic, the work invites viewers to imagine an environment “from now on,” with an awareness of the past and without imposing a dystopian or utopian vision, which is increasingly common in contemporary art imagery. In more descriptive words, Il Resto dell’Alba is like an ellipse with its two fires looking to the sun as a representation of the real and the possible but at the same time looking to the past, here embodied by the small Nuragic sculptures dating back three thousand years and lent by the National Archaeological Museum of Nuoro and Cagliari.

Sunrise as a message of hope

The Remnant of Dawn thus proposes a scenario that seems to come from the metaverse, with shapes and colors to which we are still getting used, but which is meant to be as close to an imminent and imaginable future, in a certain sense unnatural but giving way to the combination of nature-technology. The very idea of dawn describes a moment of transition, from night to day, and for this reason it becomes “the moment of the possible.” It is here that the dawn gives shape to a message of hope, a way for the artist to become aware of the present in which we live and offer a vision that does not exist but hypothesizes a solution. Patrick Tuttofuoco himself says that today, more than ever, “is the time when we need to plan more than before and not just remember how bad our end will be, because it certainly won’t take us anywhere. On the contrary, it’s just a duty of culture, in a very broad sense, to try to reproject man in a future that doesn’t just follow dystopian instances suitable for TV series, but in a scenario where this drama is handled.”

From idea to realization

The story and creative process of this wow-effect work is also surprising and interesting. “The project was born two years ago, when there was a call for tenders for the renovation of the Museo del Novecento in Milan,” explains Maddalena D’Alfonso, “Patrick and I started theorizing about a series of different landscapes, one seascape, one mountainous, one stellar, and so on. We had an idea we were heading toward. So the theme of aurora and hope was born in Milan at an apical moment, but it was here that it took shape.” Following, then, a rejected project, perhaps because it was too visionary and untraditional, D’Alfonso and Tuttofuoco found in the MAN of Nuoro the perfect place to make their ideas tangible and, even more, they discovered in the theoretical confrontation with Pininfarina Architettura – particularly in the figure of architect Giovanni de Niederhäusern – the possibility of giving life to an installation that interprets the new frontier of the virtual.

The Resto dell’Alba is a real space. An experiential place generated with virtual prototyping tools. In other words, the structure is composed of 539 aluminum strips (natural Prefa) designed with generative parametric design tools and then cut with the mesh clustering technique, a special process that optimizes the use of the material and therefore reduces its waste. In this sense, art, artifice, and human experience a coexistence that tells time in a different way, resulting in a space that is not rigid but rather malleable and hypothesizable by the individual, who is incredibly central here.

Patrick Tuttofuoco’s Il Resto dell’Alba is produced in collaboration with Pininfarina Architettura in the person of Giovanni de Niederhäusern, curator museographer Maddalena D’Alfonso, and thanks to the collaboration of technical partners Materea, Nieder, Alpewa and Prefa, Erco, Brianza Plastica, Stand Up and InLuce. The exhibition is on view at MAN in Nuoro, Sardinia, until March 3, 2024.

Ph Credits Alessandro Mori