POLTRAMACA (ARMCHAIR-HAMMOCK)

1st Edition, Salone del Mobile, Galleria Megalopoli, Milano, 1985

2nd Edition, Gianni Pettena one-man show, Museo Piaggio, Pontedera, 2003

3rd Edition, Galleria Enrico Fornello, Prato, 2009

“The natural condition, the work of a nature that grows and develops independently, has no need of the human being, even if it can put up with a non-traumatic presence. Harmonizing with this, as in the nomadic condition […]. I am unable to get away from this fascination, as at the time of my travels in the desert.”

This is how Pettena commences his description of the conceptual genesis of this project, a reflection on a piece of nature that is transported into the context of manufactured products and is modified by a minimal intervention, leading to a poetic and highly personal use. A use that, when all is said and done, revitalizes it, because the trunk, cut down and abandoned, is thereby reconquered by its context, “caught” by a net that connects it to a still living tree. Because the trunk has remained a trunk as the project has remained a project.