Page 69 - Ratti Group - Sustainability report

and studies that allow scholars and artists, whether emerging or established, to produce new works and to reach a much wider audience.
RATTI GROUP | SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2017
Partnerships that do good
With the aim of dedicating special attention to those
less fortunate, Ratti works with Quid, an ethical and sustainable fashion brand which produces handmade garments and accessories in a limited edition, created with end-of-line fabrics made available by textiles companies. Hemming is carried out through tailoring provided by 20 women from disadvantaged groups. Ratti also works with Made in Carcere (Made in Prison), a not-for-profit social cooperative which helps women on the margins of society: 20 women prisoners who make accessories, giving a
second life to fabric scraps from textile companies.
The company donates fabric scraps to the Italian fashion schools so they can carry out internal work and projects. In addition, the company supplies fabric every year and follows some students as they make their collections for their final dissertations.
Finally, Ratti is in partnership with Siticibo, a programme of the Banco Alimentare Onlus Foundation, that was set up in Milan in 2003 to collect excess food from canteens.
The Museum of Fabric
14,000
BOOKS AND MAGAZINES IN THE LIBRARY
The museum houses more than 400,000 fabrics covering more than 100 years of history, a “tessuteca” and a library with over 14,000 books and magazines, with online images, as well as a major collection of antique fabrics.
In 1995 ARF also contributed to the creation of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metro- politan Museum of Art in New York, with a space of 2.300 m3 housing the fabric collections. .
The promotion of visual arts
Since 1988 ARF has been investigating the languages of visual arts. Major international arti- sts attend the annual CSAV- Artists Research Laboratory as invited lecturers.
Ratti cooperates with the Foundation at the ARF Artist Limited Edition Series workshop for emerging artists.
For the 2016 workshop Tacita Dean created eight silk bags printed with Giotto frescoes. Recent workshops, seminars and events include the Yona Friedman Museum and the Dream of Insomnia workshop, curated by Éric Alliez with Annie Ratti, Andrea Lissoni and Cesare Pietroiusti. Exhibitions are also very important and are often born out of cooper- ation with the company (see paragraph 5.2 “Believing in young people, investing in talent”).
The various initiatives include: “Fabric as art; Antonio Ratti: entrepreneur and patron”, an exhibition dedicated to the founder’s vision and held at Palazzo Te in Mantua from 1 October 2017 to 7 January 2018.
An anthology was also curated and published during the exhibition. This gathered texts and materials relating to the history of the company and to the Foundation.
At the same time, on 15 December 2017 Villa Sucota housed the exhibition “Antonio Ratti, making things with silk”. The main goal of this was to recount the more personal side of Antonio Ratti’s life through designs, artefacts from the textile collection, photographs, films and documents.
This is a story told by images enriched from editions of the Company’s two-monthly magazine from 1959 to 1963, which chronicle an era in the boom years.
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