Proof of Culture

We spent our longest stretch in the Gulf. Dubai exploded with streetwear for Sole DXB, while Abu Dhabi quietly built museums meant to last centuries. Between heat, concrete, and culture, the future took shape.

March 2014. Design Art Week revealed a calmer, more intentional Dubai. Between rising skylines, a second encounter with the Rotary Club, and parallel consultancies in Abu Dhabi, the region felt no longer in rehearsal, but in authorship.

In May 2013, we moved between Shanghai and Hong Kong chasing work, art, and friendships. Only later did we learn that, across the street from where we slept, Edward Snowden was hiding in plain sight, while the city carried on as if nothing was happening.

March 2013. Art Dubai inside Madinat Jumeirah, VIP access everywhere, artists, press, and power intersecting. Between new metro stations, rising skyscrapers, and parallel talks in Abu Dhabi, it felt like a city reassembling itself in real time.

A brief moment inside Colette, Paris, 2012. Between racks of black silhouettes and limited pieces, conversations flowed faster than the crowd. Art, fashion, music, all compressed into a single frame. The kind of place where a meeting is never accidental, and a photograph quietly becomes…

Barefoot on the sand, salt in the air, champagne cooling behind the bar. DJs drift between decks and sea, conversations stretch from noon to night. For a few days in Calvi, French cultural power relaxed, danced, and dissolved into the Mediterranean.

We crossed China in a straight line. Shanghai’s boom and contradiction above ground, Xi’an’s discipline below it. The job was simple: make people move without thinking. Good signage disappears when it works. China doesn’t explain itself. It builds.

In the spring of 2012, Tokyo unfolded without explanation. Meetings inside glass laboratories, fashion lines in the streets, curry eaten far from tourists, and cherry blossoms falling on quiet paths. Sakura does not ask for attention. It takes it.

Urban Aesthetic Realism in balance between Expressionist Informal Painting and Calligraphic Sign – Lodovico Minelli Sarteri, 2011 Rae Martini’s “Ghetto landscapes” pictorial series moves towards the search for an aesthetic realism linked to places, lived or passing, scattered in the great contemporary metropolises. Visual microcosms,…

Winter 2009–2010. Shanghai to Hong Kong. Institutions observed, retail moved first, artists tested the city. We passed through newly opened temples of street culture and left temporary marks on walls and alleys. Nothing announced itself yet. It was a threshold.

In 2008, entrusted with naming a curatorial concept for an art event set against the picturesque backdrop of Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, our objective was to seamlessly marry the city’s rich historical heritage with the edgy enthusiasm of disruptive public art. The challenge…