Tobia Repossi’s interview on Gazzetta di Mantova by Stefano Scansani,
We begin with a play on words: you design objects that are out of the ordinary. And out of the ordinary, you have indeed gone there. China, Cyprus, Bologna, long and short haul. Why?
The Chinese opportunity came in 2009 when my studio in Milan had turned towards projects that interested me less and less. We had lost our soul of interior architecture and product design and ended up doing communication for the same clients for whom we were designing objects and spaces. Communication and the web then took over and I was no longer having fun. China at the time offered a speed of work and capacity for innovation that Italy could not compete with, so at the dawn of my 40s I thought it could be a valid experience. Thanks to a client who called me to design a large hotel and the support of a friend on site, I decided to leave for a few months. “A few months” turned into 7 years. A bit like my ‘7 years in Tibet’, but in Shenzhen, the cradle of start-ups and consumer electronics, the Silicon Valley of Asia.
I immediately opened my own studio, and I wanted to remain a ’boutique’ to work with a few clients on interesting product designs, but we soon got big orders and expanded a lot. We designed a large number of products, mainly in the IT world and a lot of interior design for hotels, museums and offices. It was an exceptional experience, but also stressful, China has tight deadlines and huge quantities, and the cultural and language barrier is difficult to overcome.
After years of work and with a few clients in my pocket, with whom I still deal, a call came from Cyprus for a very different adventure in academia.
A fledgling design university was looking for leadership and they called me as their rector. I thought it was time to move from a huge metropolis to a remote island surrounded by the Mediterranean.
Having discovered my weaknesses in the political role I had been handed, I founded the university’s research centre, the arm that connected the academy to the market. It has been a fun rollercoaster of events, projects and satisfactions. The Innovation Hub grew very quickly and acquired a reputation on the island. It created spinoffs, and companies helped startups and provided services locally and globally.
The choice of Bologna was, as in the fairytale, a choice of love. Called up for a project that looked like a lot of fun on paper and then turned out to be a failure, I rediscovered my father’s city, which has always remained in my heart and where I also found my life partner.
Today I have a studio with a few collaborators with whom we enjoy designing objects for companies around the world and we work almost exclusively for foreign countries.
What does it mean to create everyday objects? Furniture, therefore solutions for interiors; things, therefore also mobile phones?
In the time of the dinosaurs, when I was studying at the Milan Polytechnic, the only choice for dealing with interiors and products was to study architecture. The architect’s client (especially in the residential sector) always asked to furnish his space with custom-made furniture and that was considered the only product design possible in Italy. Unfortunately, this is often still the case today.
Consider that despite the tradition of the great masters of design, in Italy we were the last in Europe to found a Faculty of Design, which happened in 2000 in Milan, where I taught for years. At that time I had to go to Copenhagen to do a year of product design studies.
But the world has changed and the technological revolution has brought us mobile phones, consumer electronics and smart appliances. Today’s industrial design world is very far from the one I studied and has become immensely diversified and specialised. Today, a designer must know about materials, components, batteries, about marketing. He has to have 4.0 manufacturing, programming, and robotics and be extremely connected. Our products are often created in major innovation hubs such as Silicon Valley, China and India, by entrepreneurs who are very often not local; they have electronics designed in India, built in Vietnam, plastics from Malaysia, assembly in China and distribution from Hong Kong. All with design and production times cut to the bone. To bring an advanced product to market only a few years ago took 24 to 36 months, now we are asked to create products in a few weeks. It is exciting and complex at the same time.
Strange but true, contrary to the collective imagination an Italian creative – that is you – worked in Shenzen for the Chinese. That is, in that place in the world where the imitation of ideas and the reproduction of products is inherent in the economy. How did it go?
Actually, I worked for China but also a lot for the rest of the world that passed through Shenzhen to produce, helping American and European companies to design and dialogue with Chinese manufacturers. You only had to sit in a café in the metropolis to find people from Apple, from Facebook, from the Californian start-up scene and exchange opinions and ideas.
The Chinese copy, this is true, as did the Japanese, the Taiwanese and once upon a time the Americans, who surrounded themselves with our classic styles but made of polystyrene. In their culture, copying is inherent in the language where the ideogram is a ‘copy’ of the meaning, thus pervading all strata of society and supported by regulations. However, we have to imagine an immense market where everyone wants access to their slice, where the price is the soul of the product and where quality is not perceived as it is in our society, which has been handling consumer products for over 50 years. All this makes imitation more tolerated and the Chinese are evolving, not even too slow. Remember that by now every third product on the face of the planet comes from the Shenzhen – Dongguan – Guangzhou triangle, which is the size of a quarter of Lombardy. The Chinese are acquiring incredible technique and professionalism very quickly. My fear is that in a while we will become the ‘copycats’, if we do not manage to break out of this stalemate in which we produce and innovate very little and continue to think that writing ‘made in Italy’ on a product is enough to make it excellent.
How and why did you leave Mantua? Was your departure from the city of lakes motivated by your university studies or by what bet or job opportunity?
I went to Milan for my studies and a modest sports career, and the city of Milan became my home for more than a decade. Between the early 2000s and 2010, Milan lost its industrial character and became beautiful, thanks to Expo, a new centre and major redevelopments. It may have missed the Brexit train and the chance to become the capital of Europe, but it will have other opportunities.
Then the return. Let me write it down: ‘strange’. Because after Cyprus you settled in the Bologna area, in Crevalcore to be precise, therefore in a reality that is like that of the Mantua area.
I thought that thanks to new technologies, my work could now be done anywhere. I understand that staying in the ‘bassa’ is not like designing products from a tropical beach, but my family still has roots in Mantua and today proximity is an advantage. Then let’s face it, in Emilia Romagna we live and eat well.
What of Mantua did you bring with you? More specifically, has Mantua been a place of cultural formation for you in your field, your profession, or your specialisation?
In Mantua, I still have my old childhood affections, and my sporting companions, and inevitably the city is a magnet and from time to time I like to see it again. That profile from the San Giorgio bridge still gives me shivers. I have carried the beauty of Mantua around the world. I say this at the risk of sounding pandering, but the beauty of Mantua has left me with maniacal attention to detail and to doing even the hidden things well. Wandering through the alleys of the centre, where everything is designed to arouse amazement, even in the most hidden corners, is the inspiration to do precise and thought-out things even in the parts that the customer sometimes does not see.
What is Mantua, or what remains of Mantua in the worldwide wide-angle lens of your experience? Do not answer ‘the root’, ‘the place where you can find the human dimension’, or ‘the place of the right rhythm’, because that would be obvious.
When you live the life of an expatriate, you inevitably experience nostalgia and drifts of parochialism. Being from Mantua, in that sense, I like to win easily. Everyone knows it, everyone loves it, and being from or in Mantua is already a pass.
What do you really dislike about your city of birth, apart from the unreachability that can be experienced by train as well as by car from Crevalcore?
There are many things I do not digest about my hometown. Some are endemic to a population that has inevitably grown old and has failed to innovate.
I will tell you a bizarre but indicative thing that happens to me when I return for a weekend or a few days. The people I meet greet you as if they had seen you the day before or ask, with some satisfaction, if you are back. I feel as if I meet a friend in Bali and, first of all, he doesn’t ask me how I am, but if I have moved there.
In Crevalcore I found a completely different environment. A town first hit by the crisis, then by the earthquake, then by Covid, has developed in people an incredible desire to see each other, to be together, and even to have fun. You don’t go to places where someone doesn’t immediately speak to you with a desire to get to know each other and socialise. And I do not say this with the enthusiasm of the recently arrived. This happens very little in Mantua, it must be the fog…
Looking at your completed projects, the first question that springs to mind is: from what experience or intuition does that piece of furniture or object take shape, and what is behind it?
The work I do is very uncreative and very close to that of an engineer. Products are born from great research and market analysis, from attention to functions and calculations of structures, moulds, draft angles, and mechanics. There is very little of the apple falling on Newton’s head but a lot of technique and work. Good designs often come from reading between the lines and ‘stealing’ from technologies used in other fields. This work of ‘synesthesia’ or ‘cross pollination’, i.e. the ability to bring together different fields, to take innovations from one sector and move them to another; is perhaps the creative ability that we Italians have. And a little extra edge that distinguishes us from the rest of the world.
If you could put your hand and head as a designer in Mantua, so blissfully four-five-six-seven hundred years old, where and how would you start? Here, turn it into two and two fours. As a client, I impose no limits on you…
Let me preface this by saying that it seems to me that the administration is doing well, and it is certainly not my job to deal with the city.
I have the impression that Mantua needs more long-term projects. On the one hand, the events, the areas to be redeveloped, the investment in tourism, these are all positive things, but perhaps we need to look beyond the limits of the near future and project ourselves into a tomorrow that will be increasingly specialised even for urban areas. A district of excellence can and must be created in Mantua. Places like Shenzhen have taught me that with investments in strategic sectors, one can attract capital and companies, innovate and redevelop the area. From the not-so-true fairytale of a fishing village, Shenzhen has become the world’s startup hub, with more than 600 accelerators and incubators, and has created a fabric of companies, from prototyping to production, from design to legal coverage. A unique hub in the world where all startuppers are obliged to go. Mantua could, indeed can, become an excellence not only in food and tourism but propose itself to the world as a capital of… It just needs to find its new entrepreneurial vocation.
