The work in the centre. Quotes Enzo Mari Giulio Iacchetti before the performance that he and Odo Fioravanti held last night, the first of March, at the IED in Barcelona. As Ambassadors of the Italian Design Day, they have created an exhibition entitled “Ferri taglienti/ Designing tools for future agriculture” where they presented a selection of seven new woodworking tools designed by them and by three young Italian talented designers, Attila Veress, Mario Scaricato and Vittorio Venezia.

Because in order to keep the dialogue with history tight and lively, we need not only lamps, furniture and furnishing accessories, but also new billhooks, destined for the peasants of today and tomorrow. Work tools redesigned thinking about who can use them and who materially produces them, that is the Falci company, which since 1921 in Dronero has been dealing with supplying farmers all over the world with cutting tools.

“The exhibition project represents a reflection on the delicate relationship between nature and artifice, between what precedes man and what comes from man,” says Odo Fioravanti. “It is the ancestral story of the domestication of the environment that surrounds us with thought and practice, to bring this relationship back to a human, accessible, reduced risk measure. In this delicate area, the exhibition was created with Giulio Iacchetti, a designer who, like me, grew up in a rural environment and with my dreams of rethinking tools for working the land, harvesting hay and preparing the wood. Instruments historically characterized by an obsessive repetition of forms and a certain orthodoxy in use. Pieces of material reality that represent Italian history, with a constellation of different formal expressions from village to village. The result is a small collection of “Cutting Tools” designed to work wood, to prune it, shorten it, prepare it for the winter. Seeing these objects take shape with the ancient techniques of forging and beating of incandescent steel – the same as those of Hephaestus and Demiurge – has something mysterious and sacred that can not be explained. For me, it is a circle that closes, finally, by transferring in a virtually unchangeable material, the instance of design, of the search for a possible future.“

“Do you need a new billhook?” asks Giulio Iacchetti. “There are objects crystallized in absolute archetypal forms and historicized that apparently depress any thought related to their restyling or design rethinking. Think of the violins, fixed once and for all in terms of proportions, design and materials, from the Cremonese violinmaking schools at the beginning of the seventeenth century and until now reiterated by the violinmakers following the historical models. But we also think of manual agricultural tools, tools that we inherited first visually and then materially: unchanged in their shapes and sizes, they have accompanied us for centuries in the work of the fields, gardens and gardens. Powerful, rude objects, obviously devoid of any possible stylistic and fashionable contamination, but at the same time more and more distant from our contemporaneity, and aesthetically more and more disconnected from the tools supplied today. Tools that could disappear with the generation that delivered them to us. Their very names evoke an archaic and disused Italian, their function is exclusive of a small circle of adepts, the last guardians of this tradition. But “tradition” derives from the etymology “to betray”, that is to say beyond, so we believe that the most precious task for designers is to reinterpret them, forcing the archetypal dimension, to come out of strictly local and regional contexts to propose to the market indisputable usefulness, but at the same time, an authentic expression of our contemporaneity.”

The exhibition, open until March 9th, was curated by Angelo Gioé, the new director of the Italian Institute of Culture of Barcelona: “The two Italian designers prefer to return to direct contact with nature and peasant work by reinterpreting tools born at the dawn of the ‘agriculture. And so the billhook, which from the Bronze Age have remained almost unchanged in shape, acquire a new aesthetic dignity and greater functionality.”

Innovation and sustainability were, therefore, the protagonists of the Italian Design Day in Barcelona organized by Consolato Generale d’Italia, Istituto Italiano di Cultura and Camera di Commercio Italiana, together with IED of Barcelona, to promote synergies between institutions, companies and designers and creative exchange between Italy and Spain.