Installation and Gifts: “Testacuore”

To celebrate sixty years of Portaluri Cappelli, Marta Lagna develops a project that begins with a word and gradually takes over a space, becomes material and eventually turns into an object.

Testacuore is born from the fusion of two seemingly opposite yet deeply connected dimensions within a family-run business: head, understood as expertise, precision, experience and the ability to innovate; heart, as passion, relationships, belonging and memory.

Not a celebratory slogan, but a new word created to hold an entire story.

Founded in Maglie in 1965, Portaluri Cappelli has spent six decades placing knowledge at the centre of its work — knowledge shaped by hands, materials, technique and time. Marta Lagna chooses not to tell this story through a conventional commemorative image, but through writing as a form of identity.

Calligraphy enters the very place where company identity is built every day: the workshop.

When Words Become Space

Installation takes shape through a series of long fabrics suspended from the ceiling of the workshop. Textile, a natural element within Portaluri’s world, becomes a new writing surface.

Eight words appear across the fabric:

Roots · Relationships · To Preserve · Kindness · Example · Trust · Gratitude · To Dream

These words do not describe a product. They describe everything surrounding it: company culture, relationships between people, generational continuity, responsibility for preserving a craft and the possibility of continuing to imagine its future.

Writing them by hand introduces a physical, imperfect dimension. Every letter preserves traces of the gesture, variations in pressure and the rhythm of the hand. Writing is therefore not simply applied to the surface: surface itself becomes a story.

Fabrics run vertically through the production space like large suspended pages. Movement of textile and movement of writing create a relationship between body, material and environment, taking calligraphy beyond the sheet of paper and into architecture.

Head + Heart

Conceptual centre of the project lies entirely within the word testacuore.

Marta Lagna treats it as a small linguistic object: two words brought together to create a meaning that did not previously exist.

Head belongs to the precision of the craft. To technical knowledge, design and the ability to understand change.

Heart belongs instead to the invisible dimension of a business: people, bonds, trust, gratitude and family memory.

This overlap is precisely what interests Marta Lagna: the point where expertise and feeling stop being separate categories and become a single identity.

Calligraphy becomes an ideal language for expressing this idea. It is a rigorous discipline requiring control and knowledge, yet the presence of the hand can never be completely erased. Within an apparently codified form, something personal always remains.

Much like craftsmanship itself.

From Calligraphy to Thread

Project continues beyond the installation.

Word testacuore is transferred onto dark green linen shoppers through bronze-gold embroidery. Technique changes, but the nature of the mark remains: from hand tracing ink to hand constructing a sign through thread.

Transition feels particularly coherent within Portaluri’s world, where product value emerges from the combination of material, technique and precision.

Calligraphy therefore becomes part of the object without turning into simple decoration. Word becomes detail, signature and identity.

An Object to Keep

A commemorative box is also designed for the team.

Inside, a special-edition white flat cap carries embroidered testacuore, accompanied by the dates 1965–2025.

An inscription appears on the inside of the lid:

“To our team. With esteem and gratitude — Portaluri Family”

Perhaps this is where the project reaches its most personal dimension.

After entering the space and creating a system of words, calligraphy returns to an intimate gesture. A handwritten dedication addressed not to a generic audience, but to the people who make up the company.

Gift therefore becomes a small form of archive: preserving a date, a name, a word and, above all, the relationship between giver and recipient.

Sixty Years Without Nostalgia

Project does not look at sixty years of Portaluri Cappelli through nostalgia.

Memory becomes material for building a contemporary identity.

This is where Testacuore moves beyond the anniversary itself: rather than simply celebrating what has been, it identifies what can continue to exist.

Tradition is not represented through symbols of the past. It is translated into a contemporary language of words, textiles, embroidery, packaging and installation.

For Marta Lagna, calligraphy once again becomes a tool capable of moving across different disciplines: art, design, fashion, identity and space.

Within testacuore, these dimensions find a particularly precise synthesis: a word created to hold together everything that allows knowledge to endure.

Head knows the craft. Heart gives it a reason to continue.