Columns - Pebbles
by Francesca Balena Arista




“Etna is like a mine without miners.” With this evocative reflection the duo Formafantasma, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, introduces us to the long body of work that led to the project De Natura Fossilium (2014): three years of research conducted around lava as a material for design. De Natura Fossilium, which takes its name from the volume of the same title by Georgius Agricola, a foundational text of mineralogy published in 1546, is also a testament to the attraction that the untamable force of nature has always exerted on human beings.

It is no accident that in this project the two designers make explicit reference to Ettore Sottsass, who deeply loved spending his time on the volcanic island of Filicudi, in the Aeolian archipelago, and who at the beginning of his work with ceramics in the 1950s produced a collection he called Ceramiche di lava (1957). But whereas for Sottsass the term “lava” means the possibility of using ceramic so that its surface comes to resemble volcanic rock, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin use for this work of theirs exclusively lava itself, gathered between Mount Etna and the island of Stromboli.

Etna in particular, following the eruption that culminated in the events of November 20, 2013, offers the designers a great quantity of this natural material.

Andrea Trimarchi recounts: “De Natura Fossilium, like other projects we have already made, was born out of a passion for Sicily – (let us recall that Trimarchi is Sicilian, while Farresin is from the Veneto) – and for Etna in particular. What struck us most about Etna is the sudden mutability of the landscape. The heart of the work is lava.” Part of the project’s documentation is a series of photographs of the 2013 eruption, which are very striking: they are images of the landscape of Mount Etna covered in ash. Everything is dark and dusty, in a certain sense cold: it is the aftermath, not the moment everyone usually associates with an eruption, that is, the image of magma running down the flanks of the volcano and of lapilli shooting high into the sky…

The two Italian designers, who have always had, from the very beginning of their career, an approach of radical experimentation among the newest and most interesting on the international scene, look at the volcano as an actual mine, which, with no need for the work of miners, spontaneously offers up its raw matter, through the natural and untamable, uncontrollable cycle of its eruption. Formafantasma uses this matter – whether ash or volcanic rock – in a highly experimental process, culminating in the making of a series of objects very different from one another. The material is brought to express its potential in full, starting from the most classical use of basalt, worked by cutting it into coldly geometric forms, through to the most extreme experiments with lava re-melted for the production of glass, and pushing on to the use of lava fiber for textile production.

The collection, made for the London gallery Libby Sellers, uses place names from the Sicilian territory such as Salina and Linguaglossa, and includes small tables and stools in which basalt is paired with brass elements in sharp contrast, a clock whose hands move through lava dust, a suspended mirror, bowls like landscapes, tapestries in lava fiber, and finally a series of small box-containers. These last, lit by small elements of Murano glass, appear as miniature architectures reminiscent of Sottsass and refer, in the designers’ thinking, to the buildings illegally built over time on the slopes of the volcano, defying its destructive force.