It’s not only because Martino is a friend of mine…

that i’m going to write this:

I LOVE MARTINO’S WORK

- true. I like the ingenious way he is spontaneously recombining materials and bits of furniture. The resulting furniture is a piece of joy where you can feel the pleasure he took making it.

His re-appropriation process makes vibrating my hacker’s chord – i like a lot the strange combinations he’s producing. I do like the leather finish on a white garden plastic chair, i do like also the weird angles created by removed/reajusted/replaced legs of some of the recombined sitting object – are those still chair after all?
They all have in common the fact that people used them at some point in the past as chairs but what Martino is doing is a re-appropriation of the formal and structural vocabulary of objects, based on a workshop practice but also on a cultural approach to the joy of forms – and his actions brings a real mutation on the object…
At the same time Martino Gamper won’t stop it’s practice to a pre defined set of objects (the chairs), or to a pre defined set of process (re assembling pieces and structural elements) – he also develops objects the “normal” way, but his approach is obviously enriched by his vision and his experience of the recombined form and structure. Enriched to a point it’s not visually obvious anymore – but the strength the object emits leave its user without doubts while enjoying it.

In a certain way his approach to his very own medium is very close to the one Electronest is developing: trough alteration and derive, discussion, research and confrontation to various environments and realities, the projects evolves – the input and output process of the code is diverted, extended, reduced – modified, like in a genetic mutation. Trough questionning the essence of our practice, ideas and wishes we enlarge and broaden our vision, and at the same time we further define and construct our practices.
There’s a lot more things in common to analyse in specific practices and approaches that can reinvigorate processes and methodologies in our very specific fields, that is the generated and technologic design.

(Via assembling.)

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