ambiente – decorate life

Girotondo by King Kong – Stefano Giovannoni and Guido Venturini for A di Alessi

when a symbol makes the story

The original plan for the Girotondo series for Alessi called for a series of objects decorated with a chain of human cutouts. These plans eliminated or, better still, reduced the formal design of the object to a bare minimum, with everything hinging on the serial repetition of an iconographic and figurative element that everyone could recognise.
The little man was the result of the search for a strong figurative signal that would immediately appeal the memory or, in other words, a sort of archetypal communication culture. The chain of little men is the same motif that children make with paper cut-outs. The idea was to treat stainless steel as if it were paper, having the little men circling the edge as if they were holding hands and keeping together the objects in the bowl with their own ‘Girotondo’.

Founder members of the Boldist movement, Stefano Giovannoni (La Spezia, 1954) and Guido Venturini (Alfonsine, 1957) graduated in architecture in Florence. They work and live in Milan. Since 1979 they have taught and carried out research at Florence Faculty of Architecture, and now also at the Domus Academy in Milan. In 1985 they set up King Kong Productions, concerning themselves with avant-garde research in design, interiors, fashion and architecture. Their focus was on cartoons, science fiction, celluloid mythology, and the areas of imaginary and artificial fiction. They work an iconographic, primary and conceptual datum with a mixture of poetry and irony that supersedes the disciplinary conceptions of object form, composition and design.

Those little King-Kong ‘men’ have turned up on the edging of objects that belong to the most consolidated Alessi traditions, such as our trays or baskets. Now they have multiplied and have set out to invade familiar territories (such as the chopping board and napkin holder) and unfamiliar ones (key ring, bookmark, candles). Their apotheosis, though, has to be ‘Girotondo (Ring-around-the-rosy) Jewellery’ (1998 ) followed by a new range of textile products produced by Lyntex in Belgium (Boys and girls towel, bath and hand towel, bath sheet and bath mat).

All products are made in mirror polished stainless steel or in epoxy resin coated steel (red, blue, black, green yellow), silk screen glass and PMMA. The textile products are made of 100% jaquard cotton terry cloth.