EXHIBIT DESIGN IN A DIFFERENT TRADITION : Reasonings on a possible counter-history of exhibiting.

The following text investigates a central and problematic issue of the contemporary such as the sustainability of exhibition ar- tifacts; indeed, the current design debate demonstrates the ur- gency of disciplinary awareness (and revision) in this direction. In light of this need, it seems useful to define a counter-history of the exhibiting sector with the aim of (re)reading the case studies of the tradition (Docci and Chiavoni, 2017), identifying some vir- tuous models in order to define, downstream, guiding principles capable of directing a correct design methodology to be applied on the contemporary and to be codified for the near future.
In this context, the essay thus aims to understand whether there can subsist in the history of “showing” [1] that “different tradi- tion” outlined by Corrado Levi [2] that today’s contemporaneity demands from the design world with ever-increasing insistence. The need for a disciplinary rethinking of display, in particular, can no longer be postponed, and indeed already appears to be lag- ging far behind other disciplinary fields; consider, for example, how architecture (the discipline closest to design) has changed and is changing in the last few, complicated as it is revolutionary, decades.
In particular, sustainability - with the declinations it entails in the cultural, environmental, economic, and social spheres, in light of the 17 SDGs for sustainable development of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 (Agenda 2030, 2021) - is an open challenge with which many museums have yet to grapple systematically. Inevi- tably, for climate, economic and social reasons being unsustai- nable is no longer possible (Epifani, 2020).