Tables Riva 1920: CORNICE

This project offers an opportunity to stop and think, above all about the material to hand, material that is already a project, already a narrative. The briccole are seen here as a material emerging from the water, indeed removed from the water and from its original function to be reinvented, re-used like a relic, a fossil used symbolically to create new forms. In the same way, removing these marker posts from the putrid, slimy floor of the lagoon of a stagnant Venice can give birth to “something else”, something else that represents and reinvents Venice and its lustrous past. The elemental Euclidean geometry of sheets and panels determines the whole design. It is almost as if before being a table the table were a picture gallery or theatrical machinery, a piece of scenery on show. A bronze coloured metal structure frames the briccola here transformed into long, fixed planks, suspended, exhibited like “wood” newly discovered, almost archeological, to represent a story, a history that is mysterious and not completely knowable. The hulls of the gondolas, Venice’s “other wood”, gleaming with the play of reflected light, magnified and confused by the water, stand in sharp contrast to the roughness and the natural solidity of the briccole. Just as with a reflection, my table takes its physical for from the twofold nature of wood and from the twofold face of Venice, where naturalness, opacity and porosity contrast with brilliance, compactness and patient human labour. And it seems that in this apparent contrast – this contradiction between nature and “progress” that characterises our times, just as in the “non apparent” but real possibility of their unity – lies the hope of a common path in the future.