Matthieu Blazy on the project’s name…
Gaetano came to me and he said, “Mattieu, when you think of me, you have to think about me asking you, ‘Come stai?’’ And you have to think about the answer, ‘tutto bene!’ He didn’t phrase it as a question, rather a positive word that was very empathetic. For me, it encapsulated our story. If one day we do a stool, we’ll call it ‘tutto bene’.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, on Gaetano’s chairs…
We’re all sitting on these amazing Bottega chairs, which made me think of all your previous chairs, for example, the Pratt chair. Even then, there was this idea of difference depending on the chemical formula. Can you talk a little bit about your history with chairs?
Gaetano Pesce on his iconic ‘Pratt’ chair…
Pratt was a chair that was done in nine iterations, each with a different formula. The first one was so soft that when it came out of the mold it collapsed, like a body without the bones. The second stayed upright, as soon as you touched it, it collapsed. Some that are very uncomfortable because it’s rigid and you’d break your bones. The first one is art, because you see this body on the floor. Number four and five are very comfortable. Then once again there were uncomfortable, non-functional ones that became pieces of art. It’s a dialogue between an object and the formula you set which makes it art.
HUO on Come Stai? …
Coming back to these chairs we are sitting on…there are many different channels. There’s the one-coloured chair, there’s the double-coloured chair, there’s the three-coloured chairs, and there’s some chairs with figurative drawings on them. Can you talk a little bit about these different chairs?
Gaetano Pesce on Come Stai? …
What I had in mind was a production of chairs that could not be done in a traditional company, because they work with machines that always do the same thing. But in this case, we are not machines, we are people. I thought that we had to do a chair using the material of this company, and it was really a tribute. We couldn’t have machines because they repeat, so we used people, and everyone did it differently. I don’t know exactly in which way, but this is the future.