Centrepiece

The Coppa Camuna stems from the designer’s fascination with the age-old tradition of ironworking rooted in the Valle Camonica, located in the Central Alps between the provinces of Brescia and Bergamo. In Bienno, the ‘village of a thousand forges’, where this archaic craftsman’s knowledge is preserved, Iacchetti found those who could help him develop the project for an iron container. Thus was born a dialogue between the designer and the craftsmen of Bienno, a joint journey that gradually led from an initial design to an initial shape and from this – in a sort of evolution of the species – to the final artefact. The Coppa Camuna has an apparently brutalist form that recalls that of a war helmet but turned upside down towards the sky, transformed into a container ready to hold a flower or to become an instrument of offering. An extraordinary subversion of meaning, in other words, that converts a symbol of war into an artefact of offering. The production process in turn contains a passage of meaning, from strength to offering: the iron, turned with powerful energy and then passed through fire for the final treatment with wax, becomes a poetic object to contain, as its designer says, “the things of life”.
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