Next June 26th, 2009, twelve years after its last edition, the XIX Biennale dell’Arigianato Sardo (19th Biennial Exhibition of Sardinian Arts and Crafts) will re-open its doors in Sassari (Italy): through the creation of 250 objects, 33 designers in collaboration with 60 craftsmen’s workshops ponder over the arts and crafts production of an Italian regions boasting one of the richest legacies in this field. The event will be hosted in the 17th century former Convento del Carmelo, now reconverted into the Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo. This edition’s title, Domo, pays homage to the symbolic epicentre of Sardinian culture: the home. Domo does not aim at museologically reconstructing the traditional Sardinian home but, rather, at evoking its atmospheres, reinterpreting them according to nowadays taste and lifestyle and suggesting, through an alliance between tradition and contemporaneity, a warm an comfortable domestic style, based on an elegant combination of memory, history and manual ability. After a long and inactive pause - due to lucky and unlucky events and to the withdrawal from the stage of sculptor Eugenio Tavolara and the group of artists he leaded, who, during last century’s fifties and sixties,drove Sardinian arts and crafts towards a deep renewal of both language and contents, calling on them the attention of international press and of the same Gio Ponti who, from Domus magazine’s pages, enthusiastically supported their work – the Biennale reopens today its doors fortified by the contribution of several designers who have pondered over ancient creative procedures and the use of traditional techniques, generating new forms, yet remaining within the furrow of the extraordinarily rich material culture of Sardinia. Pierluigi Piu – invited to give his creative contribution as well as Paolo Ulian, Giulio Iacchetti, Berselli & Cassina, Ugo La Pietra, Tomoko Mizu, Laudani & Romanelli, Annalisa Cocco, Roberta Morittu, Nanda Vigo, Palomba & Serafini, James Irvine, Lee Babel, Gianfranco Pintus and many others - conceived (and made, in collaboration with the ironsmith master Pierpaolo Ziranu, from Orani) for this occasion a set of forged iron tables and seats inspired by the Sardinian textile tradition, and some contemporary cork made table objects, moulded by the turn of Salvatore Sanna.