Materia Mater is Terracotta, a material widely available on earth that is the perfect expression of nature and human ingenuity of a specific place: it embodies its pure essence.

Architetti Artigiani Anonimi aims to enhance the aesthetic and mechanical qualities of terracotta by producing works that emulate architectural systems on a smaller scale: the collection includes a bookcase system consisting of horizontal and vertical terracotta pieces that are inserted into a metal structure; the bookcase emulates an architectural system where the metal structure reinforces the terracotta, that completes its mechanical properties.

The place where Architetti Artigiani Anonimi has chosen to focus its research is the place that has inspired many of these ideas, the Amalfi Coast, where precious and hidden laboratories like Fornace De Martino and Laboratorio Ceramico Santoriello, two well-known kilns located near Salerno continue to collaborate with architects, artists and designers.

For Architetti Artigiani Anonimi, architecture studio founded by Annarita Aversa “product design” is sometimes an instrument to value a hidden human reality or to research solutions for preserving the harmony of an architecture landscape.

architettiartigianianonimi.com

‘Better Known As’ is a transdisciplinary collective consisting of Thomas Ballouhey, Boris de Beijer, Koos Breen, Reijnald Kolthof and Lonneke van der Palen. Their individual disciplines capture products, objects, jewelry, graphics, textile and photography. 
 At ALCOVA, during Salone del Mobile, the collective will present a constantly changing exhibition that resembles a photo studio. Equipped with objects, props and elements associated with set-design they will publicly perform the elaborative work behind the glossy images we daily see.

READY, SET, GO! is an announcement and a representation of all aspects of set design production. Very often the process is a dimension of denial and mystery. Through various, daily changing, artistic environments ‘Better Known As’ intends to offer an insight into their work methodology. Each member of the group will step into various roles from set-dresser, light assistant, retoucher, prop-maker to image producer. As final step the work produced on site will be instantly uploaded online.

betterknownas.work

Bloc Studios presents three new series of objects, created in collaboration with the designers Valentina Cameranesi, Nick Ross and Objects of Common Interest. In the three series of objects, the italian brand plays with colored marble ranging from simple and “poor” stones like Pietra Serena to semi-precious fluo materials like Green Jade:
The “Avalon” series by Valentina Cameranesi consists of 3 sculptural vases made of mixed colored marble. The idea was to create objects with a strong aesthetic impact, researching the virtuosity of the textiles and the anatomical shapes of the classical sculptures.

The “Inlay” series by Nick Ross includes a chair, a coffee table and two side tables inspired by the colored marble inlay floors popularized by the Romans (‘opus sectile’ style) stripped down to a minimal style.

The “Totem” series by OCI is a series of stackable, vertically interchangeable marble elements that creates different variations for a centerpiece tray element or a sculptural totem.

bloc-studios.com

Bohinc Studio, launched in 2016 by Lara Bohinc for the exploration of furniture and object design, is exhibiting new works for the second consecutive year during miart (13 - 15 April 2018) and Fuorisalone (17 - 22 April 2018) in Milan, Italy. This year, Bohinc Studio will present chairs for the first time, a vanity console and matching chair, and home accessories comprising of vases, candlesticks and boxes.

Lara Bohinc’s new works for Bohinc Studio demonstrate her expertise with metal work techniques, whilst bringing forward her geometrically and celestially inspired signature style. ‘My obsession with all things round and spherical is explained in the new collection’s title, adds Lara Bohinc, this shape is essential to our perception and understanding of the world.’

All the new pieces are made in small artisanal workshops in Italy, and combine traditional craft and modern technology in metalwork as well as in ceramics.

bohincstudio.com

WHY?

Overexposure to sunlight is harmful, but so is overprotecting. Recent research show us that we need the sun more than we thought the last decades. Also the fact that our skin is an ‘open’ system changed the way we think of cremes. And last but not least, and maybe most important, we damage coastal area’s with our over protective behavior towards the sun. Time to review this topic!

WHAT?

Throughout the relationship between the man and sun, there has been as much as duality and controversy as respect and praise. Whether for social or health reasons, humans have used diverse plate of methods, to either protect or expose oneself from the sun. From direct contact with the bare skin to elaborate architectural constructions, there are countless possibilities for accomplishing the right sort of communication with the sun. We have been exploring products and objects that relate to our contradictional relationship with the sun.

HOW?

BELÉN has come up with design-based solutions to these and many other problems. Research into sun protection in history and nature, and experimenting with cutting edge technology, has resulted in a line of products that reduce health hazards, consumer costs and waste. The availability of new, light materials, for instance, has allowed us to redevelop eco friendly alternatives, such as shades, parasols, and visors. These products offer shade and do not hinder the production vitamine D. BELÉN has also developed a line of ‘wearable’ sunscreens to replace chemical products. These are ultra light garments that are available in a number of thicknesses, corresponding to the familiar factors of sun screen. All of these products have a positive impact, including on your appearance at the beach.

burobelen.com

For Milan Design Week 2018, Chapel Petrassi showcases GEM an exclusive project focused on a research on potentialities of metallic surfaces.
The project is composed by the latest version of its signature cabinet piece Apollon and a new seating prototype named Haly Chair.

Designed from the hourglass shape and a reflection on the perception of time, Apollon is a contemporary handmade cabinet that for this exclusive new edition is entirely covered by polished aluminium.

Carved from metal, Haly Chair combines a bold attitude with a thin profile. Haly was designed by connecting the various ways of processing techniques of metal with a research on aluminium surfaces treatment and finishing. Standing in contrast to the hardiness of metal, circular shapes and soft lines join to create a contemporary sculptural seating. The bright aesthetic is inspired by the infinity of shades that metallic artisan process offers.

chapelpetrassi.com

Christophe Machet is designing tools and machines to turn poor materials into desirable objects. The pipeline project is a machine and a collection of furniture made from giant PVC pipes, a super cheap yet incredibly strong material. The objects on display all emerge from cylinders. Combining wood and plastics, the designs are simple, functional, affordable and durable. The machine that makes these products is also a mesmerizing element, adding performance to the act of production. The worldwide availability of PVC pipes allows for production to happen anywhere, limiting transport and therefore encouraging a more localized manufacturing.

christophemachet.com

Brique et Beton is a research around two building materials that leave the perimeter of architecture to move towards its center. A series of sculptural and eventually functional objects that investigates the relationship between this two matters that interact in unusual manners merging the fluid essence of concrete with the rhythmic one of the brick.

The standard element that works and generate by addition is completed by the continuous volume of the fluid mass that hardens. Is, at the same time, a research that aims to pay homage to the synthetic beauty of the brick and of the endless compositions that are permitted starting from a finite element.

At Alcova we will show the first experiments of this collection composed by pieces based on the junction of a melody and a rhythm. The solid spirit of concrete converse with the empty essence of the brick, continuity converse with repetition.

ducciomariagambi.com

Formabesta

A collective of artists that explores the limits of ceramics and textiles from a sculptural perspective, focusing on the shapes and textures of the landscape and the architecture of their immediate surroundings in Galicia, Spain. The ceramics are created from assembled pieces. The smooth surface of the exterior and the enameled and glossy texture of the interior merge to establish new spatial relationships between openings and volumes. In textiles, they investigate the three-dimensional possibilities of the looms, developing spatial relationships between the texture of the fabric, the metal and the plane of the wall.

formabesta.com

Tellurico

The relationship between craft and the environment is one with never ending ramifications. What binds the objects of one place to the characteristic of the place itself intertwines the historical, geological and social aspects of humanity as well as the uniqueness and simplicity of every-day life.

The investigation of alternative design solutions through the study of folklore and natural events is one of the key elements of Tellurico’s practice. This project presents the first results of a specific material research that looks into the possibilities of using volcanic rocks as a combined element with porcelain and high-firing glazing.

tellurico.com

HOME, CAT, ARTIST
Subjects that include multiple world aspects, far concepts longing for improbable contact points, that become possible and stimulating. Does the artist know the cat? Does the cat know the artist? The house is the artist’s or the cat’s one? Which kind of house would the cat build for the artist?
House as space and home.
Cat as alive and animal presence.
Artist as a trait d’union and additive, a creative enzyme for processes and functions.
Gataus is a project, a trial of an island inhabited by felines and a temporary residency for artists that will build houses and other things…

‘Lemon In My Eyes – Tales of lo-res feelings, crystal flowers and Baroque futures’ is a project born in 2017 with the aim of exploring the notion of kitsch and embracing decoration as a speculative tool for critical thinking. The partnership with a local manufacture has led to a radical reinterpretation of the antique Venetian mirror, diverting its traditional meaning to be placed within a contemporary frame. The show presents a series of sculptural pieces where the narrative adopts new visual languages to reflect upon feelings in the Internet age, emotional objects and decorative exuberance as therapeutic element. The silver-plated surfaces become canvas for the extensive work of the master artisan who minutely reproduced the detailed drawings solely with a glass engraving lathe. Instead of elegant deities celebrating the climax of earthly and spiritual beauty, the decorations depict sexy manga girls that cynically comment in their cartoon bubbles on stories of a contradictory society with the brevity of a tweet. The new Venetian mirrors invite the observers to be reflected among visual opulence and sarcasm, comforted by a Baroque nostalgia and at the same time faced by a subtile awareness about a constrictive and weakening system.

giadafiorindi.com
federicofloriani.com

Devices have taken over our lives. According to research, the average smartphone user checks their phone 221 times a day. As Jacob Weisberg suggested in a recent article in The New York Review of Books, we have all turned into ‘device people’ and our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first iPhones went on sale in June 2007. Today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age. The omnipresent screen culture is responsible for a social transformation. The chat app is what the cigarette was in the last century: a symbolic consumption good that makes a significant contribution to the running of the economy. But somewhere in the system are hidden costs that cannot be felt immediately. In the case of the cigarette, lungs are slowly destroyed. But what is the hidden cost of becoming device people? And how can a piece of jewelry respond to this transformation? chp…?, the jewelry brand run by Gijs Bakker and based in Amsterdam, invited five international designers to reflect on this theme by making an exclusive design for chp…? This resulted in six designs and one installation.

chpjewelry.com

3D printed models of everyday objects are translated into miniature sculptures of high recognizability.

Purely practical by design, these works reveal a new visual quality through transformation of scale, surface and color, hiding their utilitarian character and giving room to a more poetic reading.

The photographs from which the objects were modelled lack certain details and led to improvisations that resulted in a more subjective view. Blending formerly disparate objects into somewhat surreal collages upends the traditional purpose of these apparatuses even further by stripping them completely of their intended use.

Canteen Curriculum
A project by Het Nieuwe Instituut
Hosted by Tamar Shafrir and Martina Muzi

In its relatively brief history, the design school has always been not only a centre of learning but equally a site of production — one whose output is not the design product but rather the design student themselves. In the Netherlands, the number of students and programmes for design increase every year, but so do the challenges to the design industry. What, then, does design education mean today, particularly in the Netherlands, where design has been positioned as a key creative industry and a tool of social change? Canteen Curriculum is a communal event hosted by Het Nieuwe Instituut, inviting representatives of a variety of Dutch design schools to come together around a shared canteen table, which will act as a canvas for ideas, conversations, questions, and provocations for a future brief. During the event, Het Nieuwe Instituut will introduce NEUHAUS, its upcoming 2019 programme on the centennial anniversary of the Bauhaus, amidst a community in the field of design education. The conversation will be directed towards the question of the current curriculum in design and its urgencies and opportunities. This will lead to the question of who is the new design student — what constitutes their freedom or agency in exploring new curricula, discourses, methodologies, technologies, and priorities?

hetnieuweinstituut.nl

There are two opposing forces that shape everything we do and have ever done. One force ascends and strives for immortality. It consists of the need to impose order over chaos, the will to create and to change, the reason to act, an idea, an image. This force is represented by The Badminton Cabinet, an extraordinary, baroque piece of furniture from the 18th century, a perfect example of sublime vanity. The other force descents and wants to die. It is entropy, the resistance of nature, the laws of matter, the artistic humility of Robert Rauschenberg’s Dirt Paintings. The Elemental Cabinet is the materialisation of the collision of these two forces. It is the constant moral dilemma that the maker must always face. It manifests in different folds of matter, as the collision moves in time and the maker’s choice wavers between the two extremes. It is an unsatisfied search for the equilibrium in perpetuity.

kostaslambridis.com

Tapestries whose iconography and imagination represent the spirit of the age, formal sensibilities and manufacturing throughout history. Tapestries in I-MESH: the story of a multi-faceted, multi-functional thread that becomes a texture, a new material, a technical fabric that is fluid, tactile, versatile and iconic. A target and a blueprint for art, architecture and design. Tapestries in technora, basalt and carbon, monochrome and many-coloured. Alberto Fiorenzi has lifted the material from the world of performance, converted it and left it raw, naked before form and creation. He has once again bound the threads of the semantic future, creating links with the history of Superstudio and a conceptual dialogue with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. Straddling the limits between the arts, the Tapestry Collection by Alberto Fiorenzi presents unique pieces of formal research focused on subtraction – Ico Migliore – material geometries on texture – Marco Ferreri – and the colourful virtuosity of Alberonero. From projects that explore the full forms of graphic design by Pierpaolo Pitacco and the slender, almost sketched designs of Lis Beltran & Alberto Lievore to the lines of Rona Meyuchas Koblenz that open up like flowing waves, approach the syntax of Ippolito Fleitz and return to the source, the iconic histogram by Toraldo di Francia, a sort of closure that opens up once again to the perspectives of the contemporary supersurface. The exhibition will also include Salida Basica, the collective that works on recycling as authorial waste in a constant state of metamorphosis. A collection which is meticulous in its linguistic distinctions and expressive potential – linked to minimalism here and to embellishment there, the contemporary infinity held in a thread.

i-mesh.eu

Label Dalbin, established in Paris in 2003 develops art and design collaborations. Label Dalbin produces videos, installations, and performances at the interface between music and the visual arts for cultural institutions and private collections. Label Dalbin also conceives innovative audiovisual installation for interior design. The ambition is to define how digital becomes a new luxury and an intelligent material within the architectural context.

Table.Video by Label Dalbin, a window on arts & cultures

Label Dalbin is proud to introduce its “Futuristic Table”, an acclaimed concept that originally debuted at the Venice Biennale and the Design Miami /Basel fair. Table.Video gives new meaning to state-of-the-art through its custom offering of more than 300 “ready-to-play” curated videos and photos from artists worldwide. Daily auto-sync updates via wifi connection guaranteeing a steady stream of fresh content. Design by Ambroise Maggiar. Conception & publishing by Label Dalbin. Made in France.

dalbin.com

xyz is the result of years of research by AR.CH.IT Luca Cipelletti as part of an architectural and exhibition design approach that considers the design of details as the foundations of the architect’s work. Here the scale is changing, but the products are generated by the same principles as a specific approach to architecture. In this sense, they are the result of a design that is architectonic, even structural: a composition of forms that tends towards synthesis and lasting over time.

xyz is a piece of furniture. Conceived as a table, it is also a console, a bench and a nightstand: a family of objects with a common design principle.
The name xyz sums up the work on the design of all the products. The focus is on their angle: a modelling of the three-dimensional physical space that leads to the cancellation of the three spatial coordinates xyz.

The key to the project is the angle/node: a structure that deceives the eye and depending on the perspective makes the products, both surface and legs, appear two-dimensional and always different. xyz is a tailor made service: clients can choose from a wide range of materials and sizes (xyz: length, width, height) according to their needs and wishes, made near Milan, in Brianza, by Bassano Arredamenti.
xyz is a design project that summarizes the work on space, on the deduction of the material, on the point of view, on the perspectives and on the various plans of the object, recurrent themes in the work of Luca Cipelletti.

MANIERA commissions architects and artists to develop furniture and objects for use, offering them an excursion beyond their usual practice. At ALCOVA, the gallery presents new furniture pieces designed by two young architecture studios: Mexico City based PRODUCTORA and the Milanese duo piovenefabi.

PRODUCTORA’s Columbus Table is a direct outcome of the research the office did for MANIERA in the little town of Columbus, Indiana in the summer of 2017. For an intervention in the public realm, circular elements were introduced, adapting and adjusting themselves to the surrounding context. This small side table is likewise conceived. It is based on a limited combination of geometric shapes and basic material operations – a 6 mm thick aluminum plate is simply cut and bent twice – and acts as an element that explicitly seeks relations to its immediate context.

Metrò by piovenefabi reinterprets the architecture of Milan’s first subway stations, designed in the 1960’s by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, together with graphic designer Bob Noorda. As an act of appropriation, components of the original project are removed from their context and transformed into one-material objects. The furniture collection uses materials designed especially for the subway stations such as the Silipol, a colorful stained concrete developed by Fulget, and evokes idiomatic architectural elements such as the metro’s familiar curving handrails. The metropolitan project is dismantled and recomposed into a new domestic landscape.

maniera.be

On the occasion of Alcova, Marsèll presents an iconic display with rough wooden beams, designing a space inside the space that hosts and represents the multifaceted world of Marsèll.
The structure hosts Marsèll On paper, some pieces of the FW 18-19 collection and works as a set for an events program realized in collaboration with Marsèlleria, with performances, sound activations and readings.
Among the program guests, the artists Jacopo Miliani, Canedicoda and Gianandrea Poletta, Eva Geist.

marselleria.org
marsell.it

Studio Minale-Maeda shows sample objects and tests from two ongoing researches into shaping metal and making adaptable objects.

minale-maeda.com

Nanban invites you to explore a synthesis, with an Italian touch, of the symbolic icon of all Japanese cities: the kiosk.

Brought to its essence by the Piovenefabi studio and presenting the best of Japanese production, from design classics to craftmen’s masterpieces. With two special projects created specifically for the Salone del Mobile by artists Rose Blake and Kensuke Koike.

oddmatterstudio.com
nilufar.com

rooms.ge

During a research trip to the villa Can Lis, Sophie Dries discovered the «Traces» of its walls and transferred them onto paper using charcoal. Highlighting the cut marks of the manually sawn stone as the stigmata of time on the construction, perceptible in the tiny cracks.

Sophie Dries then worked on these ghost patterns to create a carpet to the scale of the body, 150 X 200 cm. She was interested in the very special process of the Jan Kath factory, which, once weaving is completed, uses volumes to reveal a pattern in relief.

The carpets are produced by Jan Kath workshops, using a Persian knot that descends from an ancestral Mogul weaving skill specific to certain regions of Northern India, in the city of Agra (where the Taj Mahal is located). Descendants of the Persian people, the Moguls master the quality of knotting necessary for the treatment applied to the carpet in order to obtain an antique effect. Using a unique artificial erosion technique, Jan Kath atelier produces an original visual result. Wool is reduced to the simplest expression of its weft while silk offers relief in bright, lustrous colors.

sophiedries.com

markunpoika.com

Time is out of balance, both on an individual and on a global level. How do we deal with the many conflicts and paradoxes of time? In Z33’s Research Studio Time different artists and projects articulate themes and thoughts in relation to issues such as acceleration and deceleration, deep time, the anthropocene, time and attention, and future thinking. In Milan, Z33 presents a research-based exhibition which will premiere two installations: one developed by Commonplace Studio, Tim Knapen & Jesse Howard and the other one developed by Teis De Greve. Both installations allow you to interact with the ongoing research happening within Studio Time. They enable you to take home or adapt notes, thoughts and ideas, according to your own purposes of learning or just for future inspiration.

z33.be