The founders of Italian design team Formafantasma we are familiar with from Istanbul Design Festival, Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi, say hello to their birthplace Sicily with their new designs in which they have used lava from Etna Volcano.
The designers have this to say on the “De Natura Fossilium” collection they created using the cold lava left over from Etna’s 2013 eruption: “When Etna erupted on November 20, 2013, a highly dramatic scene appeared with the tremendous grumbling of moving stones and the black smoke totally covering the sun”.
The lava, cooling down after the eruption, turned into a dark gray basalt. Farresin and Trimarchi, picking up this material from Etna and Stromboli, used the material either raw or as glass by melting it, or textile as weaving it. The duo said: “It took quite a lot of time to melt and blow lava as glass. The toughest part of the research and tests was to know to get to know the timing of the proper cooling of the material. Perhaps, we had to have thousands of tests for this”.
The series created under the collaboration of Formafantasma and Gallery Libby Sellers features stools, desks and even a linear clock as a tribute to famed postmodern designer Ettoro Sottsass. Volcanic material combined with brass pieces, reflects the union of the natural and the manmade.
