Leporello

Leporello

“Leporello is an exhibition venue and a project space focused on books and images, with the aim of promoting and disseminating a multidisciplinary and wide approach to visual culture. It is a funny-sounding word, reminding an accordion book, Mozart, or simply, in Italian, a small hare.“

This is how this space is presented by her founder and curator, our friend Chiara Capodici. The name choice reflects the purpose to create a hybrid space, an interior that, like an accordion, expand and contract itself depending on events, presences and uses.

The 40 square meter space is visually separated by a partition that doesn’t reach the ceiling nor transversely closes the environment: a sort of scenery flat which suggests a differentiation between the public part and a more intimate back side.

The linoleum flooring unifies the entire surface, while the choice of furnishing materials adds differences and changes the perception of the spaces according to their use: the prevailing use of iron and aluminium in the entrance is overturned in the small inner space, where wood predominates, giving heat to the room.

The iron window, made up of small-section elements, is a transparent partition that attenuates the threshold between inside and outside, making the selling space visible and open to the neighborhood.

The interior is characterized by a system of furniture that includes tables and bookcases (the latter, thanks to a joint in the vertical elements, can be disassembled and transformed into other tables): iron structures with wooden shelves, strictly on wheels to facilitate the handling and to declare the possibility of transforming the space.

The lighting system has been specifically designed to permit the use of the shop as an exhibition gallery: six lamps, each made of a folded aluminium foil around a led tube, allow to orient the light through movable wings. The anchorage system, made out of steel cables and tie rods, suspends the lamps creating a sort of ideal plan that re-proportions the height of the space and, as well as the mobility of furniture, adds tension to the whole setting. A variation in the design of the lamps brought us to create a sign for the interior: an opal plexiglass billboard to write and communicate ads, news and events.