It’s a very timely exhibition, don’t you think?

The title directly evokes the famous ‘Futurama’ exhibition organised by General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair: an immense, immersive model designed by Norman Bel Geddes that offered millions of visitors an idealised vision of the America of tomorrow, dominated by technological efficiency and rational metropolises. Taking this illusion of inevitable progress as its starting point, the exhibition explores that extraordinary period, spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s, when creativity succeeded in translating technological optimism into forms, materials and environments that still resonate today.

The exhibition itinerary reveals itself not as a mere nostalgic retrospective, but as a mapping of a veritable sense of vertigo: as Carlo Antonelli puts it so well in his essay in the catalogue. The entire 20th century was a gigantic laboratory of predictions, fuelled by the economic boom and the space race. Science fiction and art, however, did not confine themselves to dreaming: they pushed the challenge a little further, forcing us to come to terms with our inability to keep pace with our own inventions.

The core of the exhibition thus explores the profound impact of the ‘Futurist era’ on the visual arts. It begins with the origins of Spatialism: the 1948 Spaziali II manifesto, signed by Lucio Fontana, refers to the impact of the first photographs of the Earth taken from V2 rockets in 1946, which paved the way for a complete redefinition of space-time in art. On display, masterpieces such as the Spatial Concepts of 1951–1952 reveal Fontana’s oscillation between the magmatic sensuality of cosmic matter and the radical erasure of his famous ‘holes’, originally conceived with electric backlighting to signify the passage into infinity.

This progressive vision is countered by the sharp irony of Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo’s Nuclear Art Movement. Whilst Gianni Dova was the first to allude to the atomic nightmare with his ‘underwater explosions’ in 1951, in 1959 Baj signed the Manifesto of Interplanetary Art, countering the rigid positivism of scientists with a free-flowing imagination populated by his famous alien and monstrous ‘ultrabodies’. The imagination was fuelled by historic launches: the Soviet Sputnik (1957) prompted the spirited Regina Cassolo Bracchi to rename one of her space sculptures, whilst Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight (1961) inspired Fontana to create a ‘nightmarish sky’ made of blue and green neon tubes. The lunar surface then becomes a material and tactile obsession in Giulio Turcato’s Superficie lunare (1964) or a claustrophobic yet soft environment in Fabio Mauri’s installation Luna (1968), in which polystyrene microspheres are transformed into a powerful metaphor for contemporary incommunicability.

In my view, one of the most successful aspects of this exhibition at the MAN is the dialogue between the visual artworks by masters such as Grazia Varisco and Gianni Colombo and the languages of radical design and experimental fashion. In this regard, the figure of Germana Marucelli, the ‘intellectual dressmaker’, is particularly interesting. A regular visitor to Fontana’s studio and bound to Getulio Alviani by a deep creative partnership, Marucelli transposes optical-kinetic and spatial concepts directly onto the human body, as in the Optical collection (1965). In 1968, ahead of the moon landing, she presented the Alluminio collection: her models paraded in metal plates and shields, appearing as ‘romantic warriors’ ready for a space-age future as fascinating as it was uncertain. Brilliant.

As you leave the exhibition, you find yourself wondering: what remains, today, of that unabashed confidence in the future? Can we once again look to tomorrow with confidence?