FABRICA
The Benetton Group social communication research centre
Fabrica is a communication research centre financed by the Benetton Group. It was created in 1994 with the aim of combining culture with industry and offering young people from around the world an opportunity for creative growth and multicultural interchange. Fabrica is based in Treviso, in a complex restored and enlarged by Tadao Ando.
Fabrica invites young artists/designers to its centre, offering them a one-year study grant and providing them with a professional training opportunity and a wealth of resources and relations. The young resident artists develop cultural and social communication projects in the areas of design, visual communication, photography, interaction, video, music and publishing under the guidance of experts.
If they pass the rigorous screening process, the young grant-holders start a period of education and research on real projects based on the conviction that communication, in all its applications, must be a vehicle of conscious social change.
Fabrica’s aim is to inspire a specific creative category of young “social catalysts” who, at the end of their experience at the centre, will continue in this effort.
Fabrica’s many years of commitment to socially-aware communication have achieved manifold results. To mention just a few: the campaigns developed in collaboration with the U.N. and Reporters Without Borders; Credo, a musical study on the subject of religious tolerance; films from the world’s South that won awards at Cannes, Venice and Hollywood; COLORS magazine; and its series of environmental, social and relational workshops.
