ambiente – decorate life

Blow up – 2004 – by Fratelli Campana for Alessi

The novelty, freshness and poetry of this aesthetic-constructive approach have made “Blow up” a phenomenon that, despite the quick flood of imitations, continues to be the top seller on the international markets.

Despite their quite evident Italian origins, the Campana brothers are actually Brazialian through and through, and they are without doubt to be included amongst the most interesting phenomena of recent young international design. They have brought a healthy breath of fresh Brazilian and sub-equatorial air and poetry to European design.
Their work is hallmarked by “… use of materials in the raw state and by experimentation with poor and recycled matter. Their hybrid, often primitive forms seek to express the contradictions of their urban chaos, drawing on the vitality of indigenous expressions for endowing the products with an authentic nature, bound to the temperament of local folk” (C. Morozzi).

“Blow up”, the family of objects that we are presenting today marks the start of a collaboration that I hope will be long and fruitful. It resounds with echoes of the game called “Shanghai” and was created with the idea of assembling hypothetical offcuts of steel wire, welding them together to form various types of containers.

The first items of the “Blow up” family, whose production was launched in 2004, registered an immediate international success. This because they brought a wave of fresh air into our domestic landscape, sometimes almost too rooted in their form/function ratio. Their method of construction is reminiscent of the forms of recycling typical of urban conglomerates in the third world, at least as we Europeans might imagine them, but this is done poetically, skilfully respecting the basic requirements of the relevant objects. I believe this approach is a good example of Lightness and Consistency, two of the literary recommendations of Italo Calvino.

18/10 stainless steel mirror polished and glass