Mountains at (He)Art

Seventy years as pioneers. In 1953 began Cober‘s entrepreneurial adventure in the production of Made in Italy outdoor equipment. At the height of the economic boom, in the era of rampant cementification, entrepreneur Renato Covini looked up and aimed for the peaks. He addresses what was then a niche, and accompanies the birth of an unstoppable movement – even more so after the lockdown. That of those who inextricably link sport and fun with nature and the mountains.

A history studded with intuition, technology and the study of materials, which has taken us, from our beginnings to the present day, on a path marked by patents and continuous innovations, increasingly focused on respect for the environment, with investments in technologically advanced machinery, for respect of the environment and the operators who are involved in the production process on a daily basis.

We have come a long way from those beginnings in the 1950s, and the legacy of the company’s know-how has been picked up by the second and third Covini generations.

“We are particularly proud of this achievement,” explains CEO Flavio Covini. “We have maintained the philosophy that has accompanied us since the beginning: the focus on sustainability and well-being, social responsibility, and Made in Italy quality, while pushing the accelerator on the driver of innovation. From prototypes to machinery and automation, ours is a path in continuous evolution to wait for the requests of increasingly demanding and meticulous customers, with an attention to detail that starts from the raw materials used through to the choice of colours”.

An artful 2023, in the true sense of the word, because for the celebration of our first seventy years we have launched, on International Mountain Day, the Mountains At (He)Art project: 12 artists will make a creation inspired by 12 iconic poles in our catalogue, which will be reinterpreted to be transformed into real works of art.

“Cober is very connected to the world of art,” says Alice Covini, the company’s sales manager and third generation. “For a few years now, we have been creating a capsule collection of designer T-shirts by asking Italian artists, linked to the world of mountains and sustainability, to translate their poetics for us. To celebrate seventy years, we thought we would expand this concept and appeal to the ability of artists to think outside the box, a fundamental attitude for anyone who innovates.”

Starting in January 2023, 12 drops – one per month – will be released, presenting – via social channels – these original works, eventually brought together in a book. The project will close on 11 December 2023, with an event/exhibition organised on International Mountain Day.

Over the coming months, an ideal gallery composed of many different art forms will take shape: paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, digital works, NFTs. Each artist started with a model of poles to explore a language, offer a personal interpretation, expand the boundaries of what we usually associate with the world of outdoor sports. Out of this unique experiment will come artworks that would otherwise never have seen the light of day.

The project was developed four-handedly by Ludovica Simone and Sofia Castoldi, two figures from the world of Art Advisory and international contemporary art galleries. “We selected 12 Italian artists, as a tribute to the Italian character of the brand, young – age speaking, but also in spirit and ideas – and very different from each other,” say the curators. “The important thing was that they shared the vision that guides the company – sustainability, nature, innovation – to tune in to a common wavelength.” Each artist was given a pair of Cober sticks as a starting point. “We gave them carte blanche: they reproduced them, cut them, incorporated them into the work, reshaped them, brought them to an abstract plane or brought them back to the raw material. It is gratifying to admire the way each of them is reacting to an unusual object, rarely associated with an artistic production”.

The works will be available for purchase throughout the course of the project. A percentage of the proceeds will go towards the purchase of the Polly House from the agri-tech company 3Bee, manufacturer of intelligent monitoring and diagnostic systems for bee health. The Polly House is a home for the Osmia Rufa, the so-called solitary bee, which is crucial to the pollination process and thus to biodiversity, and one of the first victims of climate change and pollution. For two years, the company has been committed to preserving this species, whose presence is a thermometer of the health of the planet.