Clever head maze – Munich – SZ.de

There is an old Vespa in the window of the shop office. Sky blue and a little dented. Florian Wenz drove them when he was 18. Because the love for Italy was already there back then. Later, at some point, Costanza Puglisi sat on the pillion, together they drove through Munich. The two would not want to part with the scooter. After all, it is also a symbol of their life together. Together they are Unodue, the design agency. Always on the move.

Unodue moved from Schwabing to the Glockenbachviertel 17 years ago, mainly because of the children. Because they have lived in the neighborhood for a long time, the day care center was right next door. They found these spacious offices in an old building, with a mosaic floor and tiles from the Gründerzeit in the stairwell. “We love the neighborhood,” says Costanza Puglisi. “In the summer we put a table in front of the door and sometimes eat outside.”

A bit of the Italian way of life, even if green tea and buttered pretzels are on the table today. In the office there is a wild mix-up, Italian-German. Costanza Puglisi comes from Rome, she studied design in Milan and New York and worked for Renzo Piano in Genoa. Florian Wenz came there while studying architecture. They fell in love in the office of the famous architect. They worked together on the large Renzo Piano retrospective, which went around the world as a touring exhibition, to New York, Madrid and Berlin. “Back then, we had no idea that this work, making exhibitions together, would one day shape our lives,” says Florian Wenz now. “But we’re far from the only couple that came out of this office,” says Puglisi and laughs.

She actually wanted to go to England, but he still had to do his diploma in Munich. So they first moved to the Isar. And stayed. She began working as a freelance designer for publishers. “Literature has always been my great passion. English, French, Spanish literature. But I couldn’t speak a word of German back then.” But since she had fallen in love with a German, she began to learn the language “and to close my gaps in German literature.” Today she knows Thomas Mann better than most Germans.

Almost 25 years ago, the couple founded Unodue together. It started with an inquiry from the Literaturhaus Munich. The director at the time, Reinhard Wittmann, planned an exhibition on Hans Magnus Enzensberger on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The duo of literature-obsessed designer and architect was the ideal cast to stage author and work. “Previously it was just: Open the showcase, put the book in, close the showcase,” says Wenz. “We wanted something different.” They wanted to create moods, create references to contemporary history and actively address visitors.

“The two have shaped a new way of presenting literature.”

“Back then, the two of them actually shaped a new way of presenting literature in a scenic and three-dimensional way,” says Tanja Graf, current director of the Literaturhaus. “It’s great fun to discuss with them. They always think curatively, know their way around, are enormously well-read.”

And so Unodue designs all Literaturhaus exhibitions to this day. Oskar Maria Graf they built a huge tree in the exhibition hall, one like the one in his Bavarian home village of Aufkirchen. They symbolized Alexander Kluge’s complex thinking with a labyrinth. “He helped curate the exhibition himself and was open to every idea,” says Wenz.

It is important to them to find connections to the present. Because new times pose new questions to a book. At the Thomas Mann exhibition “Democracy” one could hear the author in the original voice, as he warned from his Californian exile in his somewhat stilted English: “Not America first, but Democracy first and Human Dignity first is the slogan that America actually will lead to first place in the world.” Right next to it, whistleblower Chelsea Manning and Greta Thunberg had their say.

The Beauvoir is an old, white, privileged woman, says her own daughter

And of course a 70-year-old book like Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” gives plenty of reason for current discussions. The Beauvoir exhibition runs until June 11th in the Literaturhaus. The book was the bible of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. But what does it say to young women today? “Our daughter is 22, she didn’t know it. And I find myself confronting her about it again and again,” says Costanza Puglisi. This leads to intense discussions at home at the kitchen table.

“One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” was the Beauvoir phrase, which was revolutionary at the time. The exhibition organizers projected it large onto the wall. A photo shows the elegant writer sitting in her favorite cafe. “And now my daughter says Beauvoir is an old, white, privileged woman,” says Puglisi, “she wasn’t interested in racism or gender.” Peng, you’re already in the middle of the present.

The post-it wall in the exhibition is growing every day.

(Photo: Costanza Puglisi)

And so, in addition to the journalist Iris Radisch, who explains the meaning of Beauvoir from a literary point of view, and a film interview that Alice Schwarzer shot with Beauvoir and Sartre in 1973, younger feminists also have their say in well-rehearsed interviews. At the end of the exhibition there is a wall of notes that grows from day to day. There, visitors (and a few visitors) comment on their impressions. It says “Critical treatment of Alice Schwarzer”, “Recognize care work”, “Thank you Simone”, or there are book tips like “Sheila Jeffreys: The Industrialized Vagina” or “read bell hooks.”

“It’s great to see how lively this wall is. People stand in front of it, read, put up their own notes, and start discussing with each other,” says Puglisi. “It’s much more interactive than a like on Instagram,” says Florian Wenz. The joke is that visitors take pictures of themselves in front of this pink note wall and post the pictures on Instagram.

The two talk about ideas, books, encounters, so enthusiastically that the tea gets cold and the pretzels remain untouched. You have the feeling that they always have several projects in mind at the same time. But they never interrupt each other. They listen to each other, pick up on each other’s thoughts and take them further. It probably wouldn’t work any other way after so many years when you’re together 24 hours a day. “Our employees just have to get used to working with a married couple,” says Puglisi and laughs again. Most have been there for a long time, it seems to be good for the working atmosphere.

They install a walk-in traveling carriage in Mozart’s birthplace

They have designed more than 70 exhibitions together, for the literature houses in Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, for the German National Library, for the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and other museums. In Leopold Mozart’s birthplace in Augsburg, they installed a walk-in coach, a baroque room theater and a game in which you can experiment with Mozart scores and hear how it sounds.

On the walls of the agency hang sketches, designs, photos, an aerial view of Naples. They designed a highly acclaimed exhibition for the Diocesan Museum in Freising about “Life and Faith in the Shadow of Vesuvius” and dealt with volcanism. They love to familiarize themselves with new topics. Also the current art exhibition “Damned Lust” in the Diocesan Museum put them in the right light. There are many nudes there, from antiquity to the 19th century, testifying to the Church’s divided relationship to sexuality and the human body as God created it. In the background, of course, is the issue of abuse.

Design for Literature: Saint Sebastian without Covers, sculpture in the Freising Diocesan Museum.

Saint Sebastian without veils, sculpture in the Freising Diocesan Museum.

(Photo: Marco Einfeldt)

“We are living at a turning point,” says Florian Wenz, “the younger generation is again much more political and sensitive to abuses, we see that in our own children.” That’s good, he says, and it’s important to keep talking. His wife nods. Then he suddenly becomes thoughtful for a moment: “But at the same time, books are being banned again in the USA.”

And already they are at the next exhibition, because it will be about banned books. But the afternoon is well advanced, so a point is made at this point, even if there is still a lot to tell. Work and life just flow into each other at Unodue. That saves the question in the evening: And how was your day, darling? The two laugh. “Of course we also talk about ideas for the next project while we’re shopping or in bed.” But then only in Italian.

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