Arianna Annunziata

I am specialized in the conception and realization of wood furniture in digital cutting with ancestral and ecological assembly techniques, such as: tenon-mortaise or wood sewing

Q&A

Artist Statement

The assembly of the furniture is part of its soul of creation: on it depends its aesthetics, its resistance, but also the type of waste it will generate (poor in mixed waste) and the possibility to recycle it. The war on packaging is added to my approach: by using passive assembly techniques, I reduce to the extreme minimum the production of mixed waste from the furniture.

To better develop an ecological approach, today I orient my choice of wood towards recycled materials, wood or cords; but also I start a research around new bio-sourced materials and other possibilities of material.

What craft do you work with?

Wood-working; tenon-mortaise or wood sewing

What inspires you to work with this craft?

I developed a series of furniture boiKousu, whose parts are connected and fixed by ropes. These two assembly techniques allow something important for me: the interaction object/individual. The user is no longer passive, but shares around the object, he creates a story with it. The furniture is thus transformed into a construction game. It is a way to understand and read what surrounds us, to create a memory and moments of sharing.

How would you best describe your workspace and what tools could you not do without?

It is within this framework of fablabs and digital spaces, the new places of manufacture in town, that I built my figure of designer and conceptor. Learning how to make things by experimenting and sharing with others has allowed me to experiment and believe in my intuitions, to be supported by a network of makers/professionals/creators, but above all to think that designing and making “differently” is possible

Are there new techniques you would like to try?

“Boikousu” is an ecological furniture presented in an assembly kit to be made on the evening itself with the help of ropes.This ancestral technique offers a moment of sharing around an object to make yourself: the elements of the structure become the center of the experience mixing play and learning.The object becomes a construction game and creates a story to tell and manipulate. Modular, fun and instructive, depending on the location of the elements, it is possible to modify the furniture and make it evolve. These objects also lend themselves well to the creation of urban workshops

What other types of craft do you dream of collaborating with?

The goal of the project “RENATA’S chair” was to work primarily with recycled wood. But this resource has many disadvantages and to divert some of them, I chose to work with small pieces easily recoverable in floorboards. It remained to find how to assemble the elements while giving flexibility to the chair.

In the search for assemblies without hardware, I was looking to work with a flexible but resistant material from accessible waste. In collaboration with the Fashion and Design Center of Brussels, I was able to recover advertising canvas and integrate them into the project : the advertising canvas is fixed between two pieces of wood. The wooden elements remain flexible and joined together. A technical booklet was created to adapt the concept to different types of structures.

The structure of the chair comes from the metal frame of school chairs. The manual work is done by carpenters in training and job reintegration.