Milan Design Week Installation Turns a McDonald’s Anniversary Into a Hirst-tinged Memory Machine
A swimming pool filled with hundreds of thousands of plastic balls is not the sort of image most brands use to mark a milestone. Yet that is the visual center of “POOL. Ti sblocco un ricordo” (“Pool: I’ll Unlock a Memory for You”), an immersive installation organized by Nicolas Ballario and presented as part of Tortona Rocks in Milan’s Tortona district during Milan Design Week.
The work is built around nostalgia, but it is not content to stay there. McDonald’s says the installation was conceived to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary in Italy, and it borrows the language of contemporary art to do so. The ball pit, according to the company, was “informed by” Damien Hirst’s celebrated “Spot Paintings,” the serial works the British artist began in 1986 and later expanded into hundreds of canvases. In 2012, more than 300 of those paintings were shown across 11 Gagosian gallery locations worldwide.
Near the pool, an illuminated wall displays another art reference: a work from Vedovamazzei’s “Early Works” series. The Italian duo’s project imagines how major artists might have drawn as children, and here Hirst appears in a faux-youthful version made of colorful oblong marks on white paper. The series has also taken on Giotto, Andy Warhol, David Hammons, and Rembrandt.
The rest of the installation leans more directly into corporate memory. Vitrines hold Happy Meal toys, a Ronald McDonald replica sits on a bench, and other pieces of McDonald’s ephemera fill out the scene. The effect is part archive, part spectacle: a branded environment that borrows from the visual codes of installation art while asking visitors to move through a curated version of consumer history.
That history has a distinctly Italian chapter. The first McDonald’s in Italy opened on March 20, 1986, in Rome near the Spanish Steps, then the largest in the world with seating for 450 diners. Its arrival was not warmly received. Valentino was among the local voices who protested the chain, citing noise and the smell of fried food. Today, McDonald’s says it operates 720 franchises in Italy. In Milan, the installation suggests that the company’s past is now being packaged not just as memory, but as an experience.
