The blind (or visually impaired) Barbie's house created by architect and museologist Fabio Fornasari arrives at the Omero State Tactile Museum in Ancona, adding to the original Dream House of the famous doll created by Mattel 268 accessories that allow him to move independently. Housed in the Design Collection of the Museum, the work, unique in its kind because it is the result of a work of artisan transformation, was presented in a public meeting by its creator and the creator of the initiative Andrea Socrati.
Born in 1959 from the ingenuity of Ruth Handler (1916-2002) who baptized it with the diminutive of her daughter Barbara, it is estimated that the Barbie has been sold in 150 countries for a total of one billion specimens at the rate of three per second. In her life she has played multiple roles, identifying as many trades and female aspirations, aroused controversy and legal disputes, as well as having had two boyfriends, multiple friends of different ethnicities and traveled around the world, speaking 50 languages. After being accused of inducing young girls to anorexia to resemble her, she rounded up her forms (in 1997) and it was also the astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and the biologist Sarah Gilbert who helped create the Covid vaccine. Even Andy Warhol portrayed her, after Marilyn Monroe, and Mattel thanked him by dressing the doll with a dress that wears the face of the unforgettable actress he reproduced on the front.
But at the Homer Museum, Barbie is also a designer holding an iPad from which the image of her miniature house comes out, a disabled woman with a prosthesis and a blind woman with a white and pink cane. A space made reassuring by motion sensors, talking bubbles, obstacle detectors, tactile calendars, automatic readers and small buttons sewn into clothes to recognize them. A place of the heart and a refuge to return to, to share with those we love and that expresses our personality, just as Fornasari wrote in his "Interview possible: Homer meets Barbie", read by Gianluca Paliotti, voice of the Design collection, during the initiative.
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