Interview with Elizabeth:

 

Italy and Brazil built my culture, my childhood and then my adolescence. Landscapes, music, color.

When I arrived in France, Paris was pitch black. I came from Rio de Janeiro, what a shock!

 

Art or Design, why choose?

 

I was first an art journalist (passionate about the contemporary) and random encounters and a favorable period, the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, I deviated towards design.

 

I'm not an art historian, I did everything on my own, I had curiosities… At the time, you didn't need to be stuffed with diplomas, you just had to prove that you could do it.

 

We moved all the time, we went to see people where they worked, where they produced where they exhibited.

 

In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, there was a very strong freedom of expression in Italy.

The shock wave of a current that took shape in the 1970s with Arte Povera, Mario Merz, Kounellis, Mario Ceroli... and which was propelled by intellectuals, theoreticians, architects like  Gaetano Pesce, and designers like Alessandro Mendini or Ettore Sottsass (who launched Memphis), Michele De Lucchi, Pucci de Rossi, Enzo Mari, Andrea Branzi. They are the ones who launched these bridges between art and design.

 

Mixing of cultures, forms, materials

 

This generation was for the mixing of disciplines, which did not yet exist in France.

There was a crazy creativity, which we find even in fashion, in the street. Fiorucci uses ethnic, African and Hindu motifs, and associates them with "flashy" colors, the same as those used in Mexico by the architect Luis Barragán on the walls of his haciendas... The artists of Arte Povera exhibit their works at the middle of the frescoes of the Baroque palaces.

 

I went to the furniture fair in Milan every year and there a lot of things happened.

 

 

So I logically started talking about Italian design.  When I arrived in France I found, compared to Italy in the 1970s, a conservative France, not modern, not very inventive, addressing only a very small elite, in short, a very conformist France. . Of course, there was Pompidou and Paulin at the Elysée, and the CCI (Centre de Création Industriel) at the Center Pompidou, which only dealt with design. It was a start.

But when in 1985, Yves Gastou chose Ettore Sottsass to do the facade of his Galerie rue des Beaux-Arts, it caused such a scandal that he had to rely on Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, to obtain permission! It is a good example to illustrate the compartmentalization of the art market and the specialties in which other dealers were confined at the time.

 

A few young French designers (Olivier Gagnère, Martine Bedin, Nathalie du Pasquier, etc.) went to work with these architects and designers in Milan.