There were radical changes on the Italian art scene in the 1980s. In 1980 itself, Paolo Portoghesi entitled the exhibition of the first edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale as “The presence of the past”, highlighting a new relationship between past and present in the Postmodern climate in contrast to the Modern Movement. In the same year, the Transavantgarde movement, theorised by Achille Bonito Oliva, was officially presented at the Biennale as a reaction to a crisis affecting not only art, but also the economic and cultural spheres of the Western world.
In 1980, the AIMC (International Association of Contemporary Mosaicists) was founded in Ravenna. The key figure in this organisation was to be Isotta Fiorentini Ricuzzi, who linked together artists from all over the world. Two years later, the Association of Ravenna Mosaicists was formed as its operational arm, featuring members like Marcello Landi, Alessandra Caprara, Marco De Luca, Stefano Mazzotti, Luciana Notturni, Marco Santi, Enzo Tinarelli and Carlo Signorini, undisputed leaders in the theory and practice of mosaic design at the time.
Congresses, exhibitions and collaborations with artists and architects of the highest repute were features of the entire decade in a scenario that abounded in vitality, involving diverse players on the Italian and world art scene and in which the many-sided vocation of mosaics started to take shape, with its ability to be an artwork, an architectural facing, a sculpture or a design object.
New generations of artists emerged, with an eye to the development of alternative and highly personal languages, giving impetus to mosaics as autonomous works of art in addition to a technique put at the service of others.
Collaborations with Milanese design date back to the 1990s: the relationship between Alessandro Mendini’s Studio Alchimia and Luciana Notturni, along with Marco De Luca and Paolo Racagni, while Francesca Fabbri’s Akomena, who took the Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts’ Mosaics Course, would soon collaborate with prominent figures such as Ettore Sottsass, Ugo Marano, Ugo La Pietra, Adolfo Natalini and Gaetano Pesce, to mention only a few, in the creation of attractive mosaic objects.