In his small and fascinating book entitled Wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets and philosophy, Leonard Koren describes wabi-sabi as “a typically Japanese artistic ideal referring to the beauty of rustic, roughly finished objects, usually characterised by the use of natural, unrefined materials, worn or weathered surfaces, by the absence of geometrically regular forms and by dark or neutral colours”. When I first saw the briccole – their great girths worn away by time and water and riddled with holes like a strange sponge – I thought they represented a perfect expression of the wabi-sabi aesthetic. When they are cut and sawn they change again and when they become tables it is as though they regained the spirit of what they once were and acquire in addition a little of the soul of whoever reworked them. Thanks to an initiative launched in the foothills north of Milan, the briccole, rather than ending their lives rotting in some depressing, filthy dump, can be reborn and conjure up memories of their past now in the context of an elegant home, a hotel or fashionable meeting place….it might perhaps be defined as a kind of romantic and poetic recycling.
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