Studio Temp is a graphic design studio founded by Guido Daminelli, Marco Fasolini and Fausto Giliberti in Bergamo. Since 2007, it has concentrated mostly editorial graphics and web design. The studio’s visual research focuses on a process of simplification of form, contaminated by pop graphics and the International Typographic Style of exponents like Josef Müller-Brockmann and Armin Hofmann. The precision of their design is based on eclectic historical references: from Japanese comics of the 1980s like Akira, the cyberpunk manga series created by Katsuhiro Ōtomo, to the graphics of racing vehicles and rally cars from the 1960s.

Shunning repetitive processes and formats, the studio develops projects that utilize craft techniques to generate materials that always conserve both characteristic and differentiating features. To this end, they employ and manipulate the specific visual references of their city, Bergamo, to avoid the risk of standardization that characterizes many online graphic designs.

The exhibition combines reinterpretations and displacements of symbols belonging to urban culture, the subdivision of rhythms of labour, and Roman history, putting the museum in dialogue with the specific context of the Italian provinces. The title Tempus Fugit (time flies) comes from the inscription on an antique pendulum clock inside their studio, where it marks the progress of daily work, reproducing a dynamic similar to life in the Twentieth Century factory.

Inside the exhibition space, the object is treated as an abstraction of itself, altered in its colour and reproduced in large scale. This generates a tension between the flow of time, which links to the inevitable end of life, and the playful aspects of a working process inspired by the creation of objects for amusement parks. The carpeting on the floor reproduces the TEMP logo taken from the cover of a 1955 book by Armin Hofmann, enlarged and endlessly repeated, it reflects the invasion of space mentality typical of graffiti and tag culture. Finally, the eight plaques on the wall take their cue from the typical format and style of Rome’s stone signage, presenting images derived from previous and unpresented graphic design works and lettering made by the studio, mixed with everyday graphics.