In the 1700s the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier said “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” Thinking on this wavelength – with the addition of totally contemporary creativity – has led to Metamorfosi, a collection and an artistic experiment based on collaboration between Paola Lenti and the brothers Fernando & Humberto Campana: an entrepreneur aware of the value of things, and two designers who have always made scrap materials the starting point for new ideas.
Metamorfosi is composed of five informal and ‘biomorphic’ chairs (Alicia, Bruco, Centopeia, Chromodoro e Zoide) and one tapestry, Morpho, made by starting with fabric cuttings. “Wandering through our workshops, I can never refrain from salvaging leftover fabrics from the trash bins – says Paola Lenti – not only because I believe reuse is a value, but also because I think the combination of different forms and colors can produce unpredictable beauty. If scraps can stimulate fantasy, how can they be considered refuse?”
Rescued and divided into chromatic families, the pieces are like the tiles of a mosaic, attached to a base in synthetic felt (derived from recycling of polyethylene bottles) to form constantly changing designs and textures. The upholstery is made with recyclable expanded polyethylene, mixed with blue Aerelle®, a polyester fiber made by recovering single-use plastics collected before they reach the rivers and oceans, through a modern industrial process certified with the EU Ecolabel and tested for traceability by GRS, Global Recycled Standard.
“Metamorfosi – Paola Lenti continues – is a matter of awareness. In a historical period marked by limited access to raw materials, this new collection offers a concrete, authentic response, which takes us back to values that have cultural affinities with our recent past, when reutilizing objects and materials was considered a positive value, as well as a duty.”
The project also has a humanitarian aspect: to produce the pieces, Lenti has called on the social tailoring atelier CouLture Migrante in Como, with the goal of providing an opportunity for insertion in the workforce for people threatened by social exclusion.
