Mapei is celebrating Italian creativity at Expo 2020 Dubai

Milan, 9^th December 2021 - Mapei is joining forces with the Ministry of Culture and other major Italian companies to celebrate Italy's creativity and know-how on ‘Italian Creativity Day’, an event that will feature entertainment, culture and films in the beautiful setting of the Italian Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai.

A part of the "Architecture and Art" session, Veronica Squinzi, CEO of Mapei, will talk about Mapei's approach to supporting art and culture in a video recorded during the exhibition entitled "Dante. La visione dell'arte" (Dante. The vision of art) organised at the Musei San Domenico in Forlì that Mapei has been partnering for many years.

This will be followed by a screening of the video documentary: "Teatro Lirico di Milano: il Cantiere-evento" (Milan Opera House: a Building site-event) curated by Francesco Maggiore and directed and edited by Riccardo Apuzzo, which covers the complex reconstruction work carried on the historic Opera House in Milan from 2016-2021; five years of work during which the renovation site was the setting for a ‘Building site-event’ devised and promoted by the Gianfranco Dioguardi Foundation. The documentary is dedicated to Giorgio Squinzi and his wife Adriana Spazzoli, who were, respectively, Sole Director and Marketing and Communications Director of Mapei and enthusiastic supporters of the entire theatre reconstruction project right from the start.

Mapei's focus on culture is part of its corporate credo that stems from its founder Rodolfo Squinzi’s firm belief that "work can never be separated from art and passion".

"This belief - so Veronica Squinzi emphasised - has always been at the heart of Mapei's operations. Working in the building industry means we have to combine technical skills and a sense of aesthetics. Thanks to the high quality and specialist nature of our products, we are often involved in projects to build or renovate homes of art and we contribute to making them survive longer and be more user-friendly.

Sometimes business enterprises working on events or with important cultural institutions that began on a technical consultancy level have developed into well-established partnerships, as in the case with La Scala Opera House in Milan, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Recently we have also been engaged in urban regeneration projects involving young street artists, because art is not just conservation and restoring the past, it is also a way of looking to the future".

Mapei is Partner of the Italian Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. Making its expertise available to designers so that it can make its own innovative contribution, it has used sand, coffee powder and orange peel to create new materials for covering the giant outdoor sand dune and footbridge over the Italian Pavilion.

By making it possible to use iconic materials for both Italian and Arab culture, such as coffee, oranges and desert sand, which are also natural recyclable materials, Mapei has given shape to two of the main ideas underpinning the Italian Pavilion: the Mediterranean viewed as different co-existing cultures and sustainability in the name of innovation.