Anonimo Contemporaneo
2019
Client: Galleria Giustini/Stagetti
Anonimo Contemporaneo focuses on the chair in its Italian popular declination: the anonymous object par excellance.
La Romanella is the Roman version of this category. In Italy, and throughout the mediterranean area, this type of chair exists in many variant forms, which however share many common formal and structural characteristics. This chair type represents a kind of object that has always existed and has evolved over time in an infinite range of variant formal solutions, each in search of the most efficient mode of producions. By their nature these chairs are ‘by’ no-one and therefore belong to everyone and they are open to interpretation free of copyright.
Sedia Romanella
The research process began while I was a guest of the American Accademy at Rome; I immediatly turned my attention on these quite, anonymous objects, that have always been at our service: ‘I found this chair in 2013, in the last remaining active workshop in via dei Sediari in Rome, immediately I thought that probably, on the same site 2000 years ago, I could have seen the same workshop. The craftsman told me that there were almost identical depictions of this type of chair in various frescoes from Pompei... A product that has remained in production dor 2000 years? Incredible! I’m not dreaming of some mythical primitivism or a return to the past, but rather of a potential model from which to reinvent contemporary design. A solid object that is apparently unchangeable because it is already perfect.’
Anonimo Contemporaneo has come into being with the aim of intervening on a recived original, varying its characteristics without altering its fundamental concept, thereby demostrating that it is possible to repeating one’s self. Two kinds of wood, aluminium, carbon-fiber, straw, rubber and leather, the chair and low armchair...and the exercise can continue.
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This collection is a subtle and sophisticated experiment where in each variation interprets a different material, celebrating its specific qualities so as to restore, in a contemporary idiom, the essential idea of a chair that is popular, familiar and elegant: both iconic and anonymous.
Project team: Giuseppe Arezzi, Veronica Camera
Photo credits: Omar Golli
