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CARRUBA
EDITION IT'S GREAT DESIGN
2021

 

A souvenir comes to mind. It comes to help: as a memory aid, a prop that sustains memories of places visited, a button that reactivates emotions or sensations. It is a personal object, which the culture of mass tourism has reduced to an impersonal standard toy mass-produced who knows where, obeying a vernacular devoid of nuance, the vehicle of a flat imagery, full of clichés. The tale of Sicily is particularly codified in this sense, and is suspended between folk and mafia, between the mournful blackness, the carnal brassieres and the coppole, the overflowing baroqueisms and a colourful dialect.

 

Carruba speaks of a south-eastern Sicily that everyone can see, but which escapes folkloric codification, and which for this reason appears perhaps reticent, grumpy, diffident - thus, indeed, profoundly and authentically Sicilian. A poor, rough fruit that is picked up from the ground but impregnates the air with a sweetly acrid perfume and is an important part of the local economy, the carob condenses the profoundly rural, agricultural nature of the place without rhetoric, indeed with naked directness.

 

Carruba captures this nature, immobilizes it and transfigures it: indeed, it fixes a moment, subtracting it from time, as befits a souvenir.

 

A living fruit changes its material: it cools down in an aluminium casting, it adopts the material skin of the most classic industrial souvenir, but it does so through a sand casting process that reconnects it to the earth. A process done in Sicily. Into the mould enters a rotten fruit; out of the mould comes an object that cannot rot, which is a doppelganger of the fruit, a fac simile, a twin. It is so above all in the tactile irregularity, in the roughness which, although cold, is yet another narrative layer, the final one: the epidermic apex of an authentic but not realistic tale.

 

Far from the swirls and brocades, like carts and octopuses squashed on the rocks, the genius loci emerges in Carruba’s sibylline and broken-down dryness, in its hollowed-out, worn, deprived appearance.

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Text: Angelo Flaccavento
Photo Credits: Fotogiunta
               Melissa Carnemolla
               Marcello Bocchieri
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