African design. The metals of power, Exhibition MUSEC - Museum of Cultures of Lugano, Lugano

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African design. The metals of power

From 13 February to 21 September 2025

MUSEC - Museum of Cultures of Lugano

Riva Caccia 5, Lugano

Closed now: open at 11:00

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From February 13 to September 21, 2025, the Museum of Cultures (MUSEC) in Lugano presents the temporary exhibition African design. The metals of power.With almost four hundred traditional coins and symbols of power displayed on two floors of the Exhibition Space of Villa Malpensata, it is probably the largest exhibition ever held on the subject. The visitor witnesses a fascinating dialogue between history, collecting, design, art, and culture, highlighting the rich variety of meanings and values attributed to the exhibited works.Traditional coins and symbols of power arrived in Europe for the first time in the nineteenth century, in the context of the first explorations and colonization of the African continent's interior, which were supported by ethnographic research aimed at documenting the knowledge of "other" peoples, also through the collection of objects of material culture.Starting from the last decades of the twentieth century, following the phenomena of acculturation that historicized many local traditions, these works were progressively alienated from their lands of origin. Thanks to their surprisingly "modern" appearance, they attracted the attention of a heterogeneous collecting in the West that selected them according to its specific interests: from ethnic art to numismatics, through modern art and interior design.The works presented at MUSEC illustrate the function and journey of these objects, as well as the surprising resemantization they underwent over time in their passage from Africa to Europe, placing them between art and culture, past and present; between the prestige of a culture of origin that creates and the prestige of a destination culture that interprets and renews.The exhibition was made possible by the museumization of two important collections, formed by Giorgio Antonini and by Pieter and Catherine Coray between the 1980s and the beginning of the 2000s, at the time of the greatest availability of African metal works on the art market. The exhibition path is completed with loans of works from the Rossini Collection and other works from the Coray Collection. Some works from the Nodari Collection, owned by the Canton and deposited at MUSEC, are also on display.The set of works presented in Lugano offers a comprehensive overview of traditional African coins and symbols of power, highlighting the diversity of forms and the multiple symbolic meanings, not forgetting the particular aesthetic charm that has also influenced Western design.

	opens - closes	last entry
monday	11:00 - 18:00
tuesday	Closed now
wednesday	11:00 - 18:00
thursday	11:00 - 18:00
friday	11:00 - 18:00
saturday	10:00 - 18:00
sunday	10:00 - 18:00

African design. The metals of power

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