Always an eclectic experimenter and conceptual designer, Antonio Marras explores new dimensions and creative realities every year through a novel aesthetic language and deeply personal poetics. On the occasion of the Design Weeke of Fuorisalone2022, the Sardinian designer’s artistic sensibility and versatility returns to amaze with a new narrative and an irreverent and nonconformist installation.
The protagonist of this installation is the concept of regeneration-Re-Generation-in its purest essence. Regeneration is a natural process of replacing or restoring damaged or missing body parts to full functionality in plants and animals, and for Antonio Marras it represents the manifesto of his own poetics. Regeneration is a circular art; it is giving new life. It is valuing and making the best experiences repeatable, it is creating bonds. It is believing in awakening, creating a perfect gesture. It is the Arabian Phoenix rising from its ashes. It is Giambattista Vico’s historical ebb and flow, the things that happen by a predestined, already written will. Antonio Marras adopts RE-GENERATION as his modus Operandi. He regenerates, gives new life, creates opportunities for encounters and fuses and blends materials and poetic instances and through beauty reproduces and produces new dimensions of materials that often in unexpected ways give birth to new visions. The stratifications, assemblages, juxtapositions, interventions, encrustations, decorations, superimpositions, insertions, inlays, leftover pieces of fabric, embroideries, earths, colors, metals, designs, coffee and tea as colors, patchsu pre-existing elements in order to create an identity, other is the making of Antonio Marras. An innumerable accumulation of thoughts, materials and people that generate a different vision. A vision that holds all elements and all tensions together and produces a new being, a new way of understanding life. Antonio Marras is moved by a feeling animated by the fundamental presence of memory. Collective memory, what in Sardinian is called “su connottu,” the known, the assimilated, the DNA that is part of us. Antonio Marras is an intimist, an animist. He loves living and likes to think that objects, things, clothes, fabrics have a soul and deserve respect.Thus was bornthe story of “CERCHINO, the anti-Thumbelina.”
