Milan Design Week
September 4-12, 2021
Chief Curator: India Mahdavi / Project Leader: Youri Kravtchenko
Alcova, Milan
The Korova Bar is a fictional night bar from Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. Within a dystopian atmosphere, the bar displays a series of naked lying caryatids serving “Moloko-Plus” (milk-plus), i.e. breast milk. Even though the original venue only existed as fiction, its transgressive environment made the Korova Bar a cult, to the point of providing inspiration for several real nocturnal places around the world, predating the Instagram era in which mediatized spaces influence physical places.
Developed by the students of the Master of Arts in Interior Architecture (MAIA) at HEAD – Genève, Milk Bar revisited the nocturnal dimension of the Korova bar for Alcova Milano 2021. The project was developed within a studio called Herbarium of Interiors, under the curatorial role of India Mahdavi. Playing with the polysemy of the word “herbarium” (a specimen reified both as a 1:1 model and an image of itself), the studio explored the role of image culture in the construction of contemporary interiors.
Students were assigned a herbarium of interiors, i.e. a catalog of 30 interior spaces that could not be accessed physically but that had marked the history of interior design in the 20th century. These were the interiors of media such as cinema, photography, or visual arts, ready to be iterated physically regardless of place and temporality. Merging different mediums such as scale models, video projection, and 1:1 mock-ups, these interiors were re-enacted, exploring the translations from media to space.
The winning project, Milk Bar, under the concept of students Lolita Gomez and Blanca Algarra, and the lead of Youri Kravtchenko and Manon Portera, proposed a 21st-century bar where sensuality and eroticism could be explored through architectural technology without the recourse to any explicit nudity. Empowering the position of the woman at the center, the project contested other iterations of the Korova Bar realized in the 20th century, acquiring a totemic presence. The exhibition in Alcova presented three different rooms: the antechamber, where all the images from the original herbarium were projected; the room, where fragments and 1:1 mockups that had been explored from these images were displayed as if it was a cabinet of curiosities; and finally, the central space with the Milk Bar.
Here, visitors were invited to sit on milk crate seats around an almost phosphorescent milk fountain and listen to the dramatic music of the Funeral March of Queen Mary performed on a synthesizer. They were given a cup resembling a breast inspired by the porcelain cups of Sèvres originally designed by Marie-Antoinette for her dairy servings. Milk was served from a tap connected to a hydraulic network that was interconnected to heavy tanks visible in the cowsheds and hanging in the installation above the visitors’ heads.
MAIA: Master of Arts in Interior Architecture (HEAD – Genève)
Head of Department: Javier Fernández Contreras
Scientific Deputy: Valentina de Luigi
Chief Curator: India Mahdavi
Project Leader: Youri Kravtchenko
Product Design: Andrea Dalmas
Teaching Assistant: Manon Portera
Exhibition Assistant: Alice Proux
Students: Blanca Algarra and Lolita Gomez (concept), Kishan Asensio, Sarah Bentivigna, Dany-Sarah Champion, Robin Delerce, Nina D’Elia, Azadeh Djavanrouh, Marina Ezerskaia, Camila González, Elizaveta Krikun, Nourbonou Missident, Filza Parmar, Patrycja Pawlik, Karen Pisoni, Louise Plassard, Léa Rime, Patris Sallaku, Camila González Tapia, Marion Vergne, Nobuyoshi Yokota
Graphic Design: Neoneo
Photography: HEAD – Genève, Michel Giesbrecht
