One morning on the rooftops of New York with Maurizio Marchiori, the creator of Tar, a publication which has already been labeled as “the most beautiful magazine in the world”.

Hello Maurizio, this first edition of the Innov(e)tion Valley Magazine is dedicated to the subject of risk, “take your risk”, a topic which you are definitely familiar with, given your personal and professional experience.
So let’s start by talking about you, your choice to come and live in New York and all the risks connected…

I came here on July 23, 2001, a strange time because less than two months later, we all know what happened at the World trade Center… it was a difficult first encounter with the city as i had just moved there and i didn’t know how or if to go out of the apartment.
But if i have to be honest, that tragedy strongly influenced my choice of coming to and lliving in the US. It was an experience i had wanted to have since i was young and it was specifically New York which attracted me, the city which doesn’t stop, the real city of opportunities. and coming from the world of marketing, it was the perfect environment where I could express myself. I started as the Marketing manager at diesel at their New York office and I stayed there until 2005.

And after these four years as the Marketing manager at Diesel in New York, you came back to Europe…

I accepted, givenmy great passion for motorcycles, the offer to go and work for Suzuki based in Belgium as the manager of the racing department, specifically for the Super Bike. But I realized that this world did not move fast enough for me. It ran very fast in the lanes but in terms of strategies, evolution and the relationship between racing/competitions and marketing, it was far from being fast enough to meet the market challenge. So I left the company at the end of 2006 and then I decided, this time with more awareness, to return to New York.
I returned this time with a new, bigger challenge: that of creating someting which would unite business and the world of creation and innovation.

We will get to your brave new enterprise mingling art and the market, in a while; but first I want to ask you something: why did you feel the need to leave a company like Diesel?

That was like open heart surgery without anaesthesia. After seeing this company grow for almost twenty years, I have
asked myself the same thing many times. I consider that to be an act of love for diesel. I lived so many of my dreams there that it was like living while asleep. It was necessary to have the courage to understand that I was ready to put myself out there in another way. In a certain sense you want to wake up to experience better that dream which you had while sleeping.

Tell me how this stimulating challenge came about together with the Veneto group Siz.

I got to know Massimo and Nicola Simioni of Siz graphics in asiago a year ago and describing the tar project to them, something I started with the founder of Black Book, Evanly Schindler, was enough to make this “marriage”happen. Tar is not just a magazine but was formed as a global project which puts into action the synergy between art and the marketplace through the Publishing area with the magazine and high quality art books, the Branding area with marketing services and the Film and documentary area with product oriented services. So we had just drafted this project and when we shared it with the managers of Siz, Massimo and Nicola, they immediately became our partners. Today the union of tar and Siz has led to the launch of the magazine and of the first book done with the artist rachel Feinstein.

What is the content, the mission, the language of this new magazine?

The idea of tar involved having a manifesto which could represent what we had in mind and which would be almost like a business card. There was the desire, as i was telling you, of uniting art and business. Who could have ever thought that Takashi Murakami would design for Louis Vuitton and make the best selling accessory in the history of fashion?

So Tar is an important tool for collaborations and synergies with important entities, both artistic and industrial ones.

Just the cover can tell you something: the portrait of Benicio del toro by Julian Schnabel. Then I can list many other artists who have collaborated for the first issue, from Ryan Mcginley to Matthew Barney, from David Cronenberg to Naomi Wolf.

How is the interaction with these “well-established” artists?

It’s based on comparison: there are famous artists who interview each other on social or environmental topics and so offer other points of view. So we go from unpublished nudes by Mcginley to an interview with the architect who wants to make Tokyo the first sustainable city, to a very interesting article about overpopulation… the magazine it’s not a platform to celebrate but a place for expression. if we went to Schnabel with something on Paris Hilton, he probably would not have listened, but we asked him his opinion on the relationship between Benicio del Toro and Che Guevara in the film Che.
He was very moved abd decided to shoot the portraits of Benicio himself wich were then used in the magazine.

Tar, is it an anagram of art.

It is a play on the word art but there is more. “Tar” in English is all that comes from the distillation of organic material… translated in a somewhat “Venetian” way, i can say that the mission of tar is: “Whatever you come across, squeeze it”. By squeezing, skimming, you can always manage to extract something positive.

So Tar is like the desire to squeeze anything that you come across in order to find solutions and new ideas. Coming back to your origins: people from Veneto are used to squeezing, always adding, as you have also done, a good measure of risk…

For me life is made only of risks. regardless of what you do, you are obligated, at a certain point, to turn left or right.
But going back to the Veneto-US relationship, one thing that strikes me is that the term “failure” does not exist in the american vocabulary. Here you don’t fail, You stop doing something because certain factors did not lead to success. this does not mean that the person is a failure, on the contrary. I think that in life it is more important to take a risk and at most to say “i was not able to do it”, rather than not ever trying. It is necessary to be tough most of all in such a competitive environment, but if one wants to be the protagonist of one’s life, one must take a risk, it is an integral part of projecting oneself into the future. The only thing about Veneto is that the quality of life is so high that risk is not as
important as it should be, especially among the young. They are used to things being too good. To think that at the age of fifty i left my comfortable home, my friends, my country, to live in a 39 square meter apartment and go out and about as a complete foreigner. This is taking a risk. it is fundamental for growth. I advise everyone to leave Veneto and measure their own roots, their own values in the world outside, in order to reinforce them.