Festival set designers: “A floral suggestion for the Festival scene.”
A flower blossomed on the Ariston stage, amid games of mirrors and transparencies: this is the suggestion that – abandoning the purely horizontal/vertical dimension – accompanied Gaetano and Maria Chiara Castelli in designing the set design for the Sanremo Festival 2024, him for the 22nd time and her for the 10th.
“This year we wanted to rely on organic forms, taking inspiration from a flower such as the orchid and its petals, exaggerating its shapes, to design in a soft way even the two side staircases, wanted by Amadeus, from which the competing artists will descend. The central part, on the other hand, will be automated and can be raised to become the “door” for presenters and guests to the stage, under which the orchestra will find space”.
All illuminated by an interplay of semi-transparent scenic materials that can alternately give the effect of glass or mirrors:
“It was a very demanding and complex work that directly involved the director of photography, Mario Catapano (RUFA guest speaker for new workshop session), and the group in charge of graphics, precisely because it is a lighting that has abandoned the traditional projectors on Americas and is strongly integrated with the set design, with surprising effects for the ‘transformations’ it can create on the Ariston stage.
Not only that, because even the stalls will enter the set design with a suspended mirrored element”.
This work began as early as March 2023, shortly after the end of the Festival, and became a reality with the start of set construction at the Ariston Theater in early December.
