Elena Salmistraro's Imaginative Place

01/10/2020 - Illusion, imagination, dream, utopia. These are the ingredients of Hotel Chimera, the installation by Elena Salmistraro at Spazio CEDIT in the city’s Brera district created for Milano Design City.
Hotel Chimera is an escape from reality. The heterogeneous mix of elements in the Chimera ceramic wall tiles collection creates striking backdrops.
 
“It’s not easy to convey the spirit of such a wide-ranging collection in a single installation. Hence the idea of Hotel Chimera, a sort of non-place, a location free of all ties and bonds to reality. Above all it is a place that brings a variety of elements together to create a crucible for images, where the artificial reigns supreme,” explains the collection’s designer Elena Salmistraro.

Conceived as a journey through time, the installation moves across the sequence of 20^th century design movements with the aid of the collection’s graphic themes. It starts from in the hotel’s reception area clad in “Empatia” slabs, creating an interior based on Art Deco images in black and white that form modules and geometric shapes. Opposite is a lounge area representing the Modern Movement with the “Ritmo” slabs, freely inspired by such leading Bauhaus figures as Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers.
 
These interiors are separated by a sinuous curve which subdivides and compacts the entire installation. On the second level are two panels covered with “Radici” and “Colore” slabs. The former references the animalier trends of the Radical period and provides a perfect setting for a possible bedroom. The latter - in a hyper-decorative contemporary style - might be the perfect wall covering for a restaurant.

 “This dream-hotel also has a facade in the form of an illustration embracing the collection’s graphics, signs, colors and inspirations,” Salmistraro concludes.
 
Elena Salmistraro once again confirms her talent as an artist and designer with incomparable communicative power. Large ceramic slabs are the perfect medium for her since they offer both visual and tactile potentials enabled by innovative technologies that reproduce the texture of leathers and fabrics.
 
Elena Salmistraro’s Hotel Chimera can be viewed every day from 10:00 to 19:00 starting on  September 28.