Over a table

Something happens, a leap, flight. That shift of a few degrees is a subtle but definitive movement. A chair that does not rest on the floor but on fragile little cups on a table is a device which, on its own, reveals an encounter with another person, in a clean, rigorous, peremptory composition. Everything is out of place, every role has been subverted, all convictions and habitual thinking about the sense of objects and their function are overturned. What supports is supported; what is precarious is structural. Thus the life of things flows between solids and hollows, the white and black sketched by the faint patterns on the cups. In the staging of these objects trouvés lies all the secret poetry of objects that lend themselves to another possible story, there is the energy of things that slide on circular and ever present time, that of functions never revealed and of intentions in waiting. And there is, in the clean cuts of the blacks and in the rarefaction of the whites and in that almost pop dimension of the chair, an invisible intimate and familiar domestic aura, which turns movement into a vision for consciousness and not into a sense of disorientation. What happens to the expression, and thus to thought when known objects are perceived differently? What happens is that they go back to being archetypes, tautologies, ideas. About oneself and the world. Alessandra Spranzi (1962) lives and works in Milan. Exhibitions in public and private spaces, in Italy and abroad, have been dedicated to her work – photography and video – She has written several books, including Selvatico (o colui che si salva), Cose che accadono and Tornando a casa. She lectures at Milan’s Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and at the Brera Accademia di Belle Arti. Wafer, designed by Monica Armani for Molteni&C, is a stackable chair with clean taut lines. The solid wood structure supports the seat and back made of an innovative, fully ecological and recyclable material. This allows the load bearing part and the covering to be thermoset in a single element. Molteni&C started the photography commission project in 2007. They asked Paola De Pietri, Francesco Jodice, Antonio Biasiucci, Miro and Olimpia Zagnoli and Alessandra Spranzi to illustrate the objects, gestures, people and places that make up their world.