STAGECRAFT

Ten rugs take the stage in a small-town opera house in the heart of the Italian countryside, about 40 miles south of Milan. The Teatro Sociale di Stradella is like a mini La Scala in a place with a population of about 10,000. The building, which opened in 1846 and was financed by the townspeople, is a perfect example of the role opera plays in the Italian cultural imaginary. The design atelier Fornasetti occupies a similarly distinct position within Italian culture. Founded by Piero Fornasetti in the 1940s and still based in Milan under the direction of his son Barnaba, the company has built a visual language that is intellectual yet decorative, classical yet touched by surrealism. The effect is molto Milanese: ironic, fantastical, and executed with bourgeois precision. cc-tapis, the innovative rug company founded in 2011 by Fabrizio Cantoni and Nelcya Chamszadeh, has taken a similarly expansive view of rugs, treating them not as mere accessories but as design surfaces — the element that sets the scene and turns any room into a stage. Under the creative direction of Daniele Lora, the company has worked with over 60 collaborators, including some of the main protagonists of the contemporary design scene: Bethan Laura Wood, Formafantasma, India Mahdavi, Martino Gamper, Muller Van Severen, and Philippe Malouin, to name but a few. The partnership with Fornasetti is among its most expansive, ranging from fine hand-knotted pieces made with a Tibetan technique to embroidered tapestries produced by artisans in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Barnaba Fornasetti describes the collaboration as an encounter between two Italian “entities” committed to research and to expanding the limits of their own expressive languages. For Cantoni, however, the collaboration also carries a personal charge. When he first moved to Paris as a student, he discovered Fornasetti at the cult boutique L’Eclaireur on rue des Rosiers. “I remember looking at it in the window and thinking: I’ve never seen anything like this, and at the same time I felt like I had seen it before, it felt so familiar,” he recalls. His memory suggests how deeply Fornasetti’s world of architectural fragments, cards, eyes, hands, keys, lips, locks and doors, snakes, suns, and moons taps into the Italian visual subconscious, like a shared cultural lexicon — one that he has now helped translate into rugs. For Cantoni, one of the perks of cc-tapis is the direct exchange with the many designers he works with, in this case, spending time with Barnaba Fornasetti in the archive, selecting the perfect “divas” for the living room. “When I work with designers I admire, they’re like stars to me, and I become a groupie.”