First up, could you let us know a bit about your work and the journey you’ve taken to get here?

It’s difficult to define my work. My background is in furniture and interior design, but my practice gradually moved toward a hybrid field I define as research design, which mostly materialises in unique pieces that crossover into installation and art.

Since childhood I’ve always drawn and designed, imagining architectures and objects. My grandfather was a very practical person, he worked for the railways, and I think watching him use his hands for simple tasks around the house always fascinated me. My father constantly collected objects and transformed them in simple ways so they could serve new purposes, reprogramming them.

I first studied design in Florence and later in Milan. I was deeply fascinated by the research of the Italian Radical groups based in Florence during the 1970s, and later by the research design scene developing in Northern Europe in the early 2000s.

After graduating I spent a year in the Netherlands working for Atelier Van Lieshout. There I learnt to work with different materials, but above all an approach based on learning through making. I then moved to Paris where I produced concrete pieces and after a year opened my own studio, while occasionally collaborating with collectives on architectural projects.

I’ve had a variety of experiences, my work tries to bring them together through a language that I believe is made of matter, memory and time.

You work across a number of different materials, when approaching a project what’s your starting point?

My starting point is often what is already there, whether it’s a space to intervene in or a material itself. I rarely choose a material as a solution. Instead, I try to give form to an idea through that material.

A lot begins with my own perceptions and emotional attachments to the world outside myself, and with the attraction that a particular element exerts on me. Through my work I try to communicate that same attraction and transfer it to the viewer.

I never begin from a fixed concept. Rather, I explore starting from an initial spark of fascination, extracting and developing what I first sensed or glimpsed.

The workshop is extremely important, both as an active part of the exploratory process through the hand, and as a generator of connections between materials, fragments, leftovers and everything that meets and evolves within that space.

Having seen your studio, it seems that drawing is a key part of your process?

Drawing has always been part of me. It’s what has always represented or defined me in my own eyes, while also being something that gives me unique satisfaction, both during the process and when I achieve a result that truly satisfies me.

At the same time, it’s something that has always attracted me and that I’ve always loved in the work of other artists, whether technical or artistic drawing, and regardless of the medium.

In my work it has a dual function. The first is as a form of notation during exploration and development. It allows me to quickly record a step that feels interesting, to fix what I’ve perceived and imagined into an aesthetic and evocative form.

The second is completely self-contained, linked to pure pleasure, where drawing exhausts its function. Even when it represents something, I’m more interested in the graphic result, in whether it gives me visual satisfaction.

It’s a part of my work that rarely emerges publicly, even though I think I’m becoming increasingly attached to my drawings, perhaps more than to anything else.

Has Florence’s artistic history influenced your work?

I think it has shaped me profoundly, and that many of the things that speak to me are somehow connected to it.

The geometry, the balance between parts, the solid and continuous volumes that can be found throughout the city, but especially in rural architecture, where monochromatic masses of masonry relate to one another in compositions that have a unique equilibrium.

The same can be said for the surrounding landscape, where human intervention has shaped the territory with an impeccable aesthetic balance.

I rediscovered Florence when I moved back here, when I began visiting churches and museums with different eyes from those I had when I left. I discovered extraordinary colour palettes and forms that continue to be a great source of inspiration.

Where do you find inspiration, that initial spark?

It may sound banal, but truly almost everywhere. I think that once you train your eye, it doesn’t take much to find inspiration in the landscapes we cross every day, which are ultimately made of materials and relationships between them.

Travelling, especially by train or motorway, gives me a great deal of inspiration, perhaps because it feels like watching a continuous sequence of objects and materials passing by.

Infrastructure fascinates me deeply, the practical yet monumental aesthetic of retaining walls, viaducts and industrial structures. Along railways and highways there are also countless unplanned and abandoned places where neglect creates unexpected relationships and unusual, interesting configurations.

It’s something we are losing in cities, where ideas of decorum and order tend to eliminate everything that emerges when things are allowed a certain degree of freedom, simply to avoid the risk that something uncontrolled or undesirable might appear.

Returning to your question, I actually take little inspiration from nature itself, because I feel I could never reproduce or translate it into something equally compelling. It would almost feel like a form of violence or appropriation. The human-made environment, on the other hand, feels like something I can reinterpret.

At times I borrow natural elements within my work, but what truly fascinates me is the relationship between the natural and the human, between the forms of nature and the forms created by people.

A lot of your final outputs sit in the realm between art and design. Do you set out with that intention?

I usually begin from a concept or from materials I want to activate, so in many ways function is not the main idea behind the work.

At the same time, I like objects. I like the way they interact with users, so I’m also interested in questioning what design is, or what it can become.

Sometimes I feel that function itself is a very powerful language through which people can interact with an entity. In the end, I think I always consider utility, whatever that may mean, as a tool.

I’m also increasingly trying to engage with architecture, which has been one of my greatest passions since childhood. I think what I ultimately love is activating people through relationships, use and memory.

Would I be right in thinking that the relationship between opposites is a theme that interests you?

Undoubtedly. The relationship between two contrasting elements attracts me greatly because of the way they interact and influence one another, the way they communicate, and the way they alternately position themselves as figure and background, enhancing each other in the process.

During the creative process, I’m interested in the point where thought stops and intuition takes over. Does that cross-over resonate with you?

It doesn’t happen to me very often. Coming from a design background, the project is always present. My way of thinking is structured that way. There is a great deal of control. The beginning is often, almost always, an intuition, but from there I build a structured design process around it.

At the same time, I won’t deny that I would like, and am actively trying, to integrate more intuition into the later phases of the process.

As I mentioned earlier, my design process is highly exploratory, so there is always a phase of understanding and rationalising the initial intuition.

one final question, what excites you about the future?

The belief that I will continue learning new things and meeting people who will make me better, bring me closer to myself, and enrich me along the way.

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