STORIES. INSTANTS,

MEMORIES, VISIONS.

CHIARA ALESSI

Journalist and writer

Children stare at the walls of a farmhouse, wondering what the

cracks are, and whether every mark is a path and every path is a story.

They think that miniature beings live in the air pockets that have formed,

and the detaching plaster is like an avalanche cascading from a glacier.

They don’t ask why the colours are as they are, because they just had

to be like that. And every square centimetre becomes the first page of

an adventure that restarts at every break in the pattern. Could this be

why we say that both textures and plots have twists, and stories are

woven? As even children know, walls are tales. +Not only do they contain

adventures, emotions, moments, loves and hates and record them on

their surfaces; their uneven, active surfaces generate new imaginary

worlds, in which one can literally get lost.

The “Storie” collection by Giorgia Zanellato and Daniele Bortotto

brings this metaphor to three-dimensional life by expressing the

moods, loves and hates and moments that the walls and floors of old

Italian homes conserve, and capturing them in a frozen instant. The

theme of time and the changes wrought in matter by the passing

seasons, weather and human action have always been a strong source

of inspiration for architects: some have tried to freeze it, while others

have used sleight of hand to embrace it while resisting its effects, and

yet others have accelerated, anticipated, directed and re-created it.

Zanellato and Bortotto do all these things at once, engaging in a duel

with History with a capital H, in which it is never clear who is winning:

design or object, man or nature, culture or time. And it is probably this

unresolved tension which makes the “Storie” designs so universal and

meaningful, so intimate and yet familiar. The floor is the only thing we

can be certain that everyone entering our home will touch, and at the

same time it is the most intimate part, the most steeped in private

happenings. They talk about having your “feet firmly on the ground”.

This image stands for common sense, but also a recognition of how

things are, how things work. The wall is a synecdoche, too: it is the part

of the home that expresses an idea of solidity, the layering of time, the

passage of lives. “Storie” gives form to this metaphor by drawing a line

that links the most classical of taste to a sophisticated modernity of

taste and style.

STORIE

Storie: note sulla collezione | Storie: notes on the collection

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