Archive

Cold War–era military relics are approached as monuments trouvés, whose original defensive function has collapsed. Through spatial arrangements, the project brings their symbolic, historical, and cognitive layers into relation, allowing them to surface as a condition of the exhibition.

"Tabula Insomnia", Series of N. 26 originals, 2024. Oil pastels, vinyl glue, oil, acrylic, plaster, on paper ~49 x 37 cm.

"Voodoo Child", Series of N. 46 originals, 2024. Oil pastels, vinyl glue, oil, acrylic, plaster, on paper ~ 50 x 26 cm.

Corpus Terrae binds drawings of landscapes torn from the earth into a single volume. Twenty-six original plates are made of materials, marks, and gestures, layered like geologies of non-functional rationality that interpenetrate. The "geological" composition changes in each plate, allowing the various layers to blend or repel each other, making it possible for surfaces containing fragments of adjacent materialities to peel within the drawing's thickness.

Designed as an ecological infrastructure, the wall provides habitat for plants, insects, and animals. It is conceived as an “open project” that sets the foundation for other groups of students to expand and complete the perimeter of @giada.sociale, in the future.

The Exhibition Inclusive Design at Milano Design Week is designed as an architectural prosthetics made by hacking existing top Swiss products to showcase leading research and development on inclusive design strategies.

Tempietto R. is a nursery designed to be constructed with the exclusive use of roof battens in collaboration with architecture students to replace an existing greenhouse previously burned by arson. The structure follows the simple logic and proportion of a "temple" to celebrate the holy spirits of the "genius loci" impersonated by the volunteers of the Ramarro Association who are protecting the natural forest from criminal arsons.
The project was realized within the initiative "Bosco Colto", promoted by Marco Navarra as an architectural and landscape laboratory to explore innovative ways and practices to inhabit the territory surrounding the city of Caltagirone.

The exhibition "Densification or Displacement? When New Buildings Replace" at ZAZ Museum Bellerive puts social and structural aspects of urban densification through replacing new buildings up for discussion.

The exhibition scenography is conceived as an artistic installation using an "as found" strategy to reduce waste and provide a conceptual and poetic approach: the global case studies are showcased inside window frames from a demolished building in Zurich, and all the furniture, produced explicitly for the exhibition were auctioned afterwards.

"Opera Aperta", designed together with Beatrice Fontana and Frank Dittmann, is an installation that reflects on the Baugespanne, a distinctive tool of the Swiss building process used to visualise any architectural volume preceding its construction.
Decontextualised and stripped of its primary function, the Baugespanne installation of Opera Aperta shows its strong sculptural essence by hacking the exhibition space and seizing the exhibition venues of Palazzo Miccichè.

"Tabula Incerta", N. 24 originals, 2023. Oil pastels, vinyl glue, oil, acrylic, plaster ~ 30 x 24.2 cm.

The seven drinks describe a trip down memory lane "to the end of the night" to steal a bit of paraphrase from the title poem of Céline's novel, to describe the passing through a difficult period, accompanied to the edge of the city where my studio is located and where these seven vertigoes were composed and then matured between 2019 and 2023, taking this form. Each of them has been given the name of a song, inspired by the taste and situation that each of my potions should capture.
The recipes have simple steps and lend themselves to the interpretative variations, even professional ones, of those who decide to perform them. Still, in their nature, they have been imagined to be composed at home, in the countryside, in a meadow, at the seaside.

Tabula Scripta", N. 52 originals, 2023. Oil pastels, vinyl glue, oil, acrylic, plaster, on paper ~ 30 x 24.2 cm.

Two men meet in an abandoned countryside in the shade of an olive tree, or perhaps in the shadow of a rusty sheet metal roof. The first man is a farmer. The second is a lawyer. The farmer needs help, and the lawyer works as a volunteer for an organization that reactivates land confiscated from the mafias and is there to advise the farmer on how to start a path to legality.
This scene is fictional, from Antonio Scarponi’s imaginative design process. But it is a clear image, resurfaced as he was working on a project for a mobile pavilion that could host this kind of activity in southern Italy, imagining this kind of encounter and this kind of relationship between two men or perhaps two brave women rebelling against their fate.
Scarponi wondered about the symbolic form of a chair, dropped into this context that he designed and where those two men or those two women, were supposed to meet. In this place, the Innocent Chair was born as a symbolic way not to accept the world but to transform the small part of it into our hands.

An abandoned seller was activated for the installation as a place of fantasies and memories. The installation, infact, consists of a mere composition of ropes, bare wood, and shadows.

The participants of the CAS explore different categories of spatial knowledge, learn about new tools and technologies and can apply targeted strategies for designing, changing or mapping space to address complex spatial transformation projects professionally. Through a transformation of the working environment, artistic interventions, participation processes, and development of new services or entrepreneurial initiatives.

No to War Drawings, N. 20 originals, 2022. Oil pastels, vinyl glue on canvas, ~ 22.5 x 29.5 cm.
"No to War Drawings" it is a series of original drawings produced for the fundraising auction of architectural drawings for humanitarian aid to Ukraine 30.04.2022 Zürich / 17:00-21:00, Seebahnstrasse 155, organized by: Leonid Slonimskiy, Blanca Garcia, Anastasia Vaynberg.

Commissioned by the Zurich Center for Creative Economy (ZCCE) in 2022 for the first convention on Creative Economies and "Cultural Heritage", the space transformation canvas is a flexible design tool to involve, collaborate and manage goals and vision with different stakeholders simultaneously.

The Jericho Rose is an event concept strategy for the involvement of the public during the Festspiele Zurich. The project consists of mobile and modular grandstands which could host workshops and temporary stores underneath. The modules can be assembled and create an arena to host the public for concerts or theatre shows or used independently as urban types of furniture.

Udategia, in basque, means the place where summer is produced and kept.
This temporary pavilion was built in two and half days of pandemia in December 2020, with the help of a small group of talented, dedicated young architects on the Institute of Basque Architects terrace for the Food Hack Lab. The Pavilion will “produce” the “summer” and its products via automated hydroponics.

Based on the literary archetype of Walden by Henry Thoreau, students reflects on the meaning of freedom and the impact of digitalization on the future of work: the "digital forest" of our times.

The workshop focuses on designing and constructing a "hut" made of waste material found in the Zurich University Campus as a symbolic second "nature" of the digital era.

The fashion booth is an exhibition scenography device to store, transport and showcase the Ikat from Sikka products in multiple locations.
"Tenun Ikat Sikka" is an association that protects the practice, the tradition, the knowledge and the intellectual rights of the recently acknowledged Geographical Indication (GI) of the Ikat technique from Sikka Indonesia.

"Le Confessioni di Cagliostro" is a notebook contribution to raise awareness on the theme of creativity as a tool for social change and to spread the culture of sharing and giving. It is now part of the Moleskine Foundation collection: pieces of work created by different authors and thinkers on Moleskine notebooks and donated to the Foundation to help support its activities.

The project aimed to activate BA design students to design and build mobile kitchen modules made exclusively with parts assembled "as found". Our work is conceived as a device to interweave a "new" neighbourhood using food as an intercultural language.

Paesaggi Postumi, 2019. № 18 originals, ~ 29.5 x 30 cm.
Oil crayons, vinyl glue, plaster, on linen tissue or paper.

ARTS and SPACE is a project commissioned by the Zurich University of the Arts to design a new study program that involves all five school departments (Music, Theater, Cultural Mediations and Design) involving a major-minor system, to educate a new form of space expert or a space agent that can activate space transformation through the arts, culture and design summarized in five actions.
The program is designed to interweave the existing study programs allowing the possibility to maximize the current curriculums and allowing students to customize their interdisciplinary profiles.
The project results from a two-year participation program with the faculty members of all five departments.
Below is an extract from "The Knowledge of the Form" published in "Art, Self & System", edited by Donatella Bernardi and Published by SternBerg Press in 2019.

La Città Libera is a performative installation that aims to explore participatory "off-grid neighbourship" architectural forms.
La Città Libera consists of a toolbox that stimulates the general public's imagination to develop participative self-sufficient urbanization. The toolbox contains 1:50 architectural elements to assemble a hypothetical housing concept to host eight people at "Swiss living standards".

The pavilion is conceived as an architectonic contribution to the iconographic tradition of the Jungfrau series initiated by Paul Klee, Arnold Böcklin, and Ferdinand Hodler and carried until today by many other artists.

The workshop's goal was to develop a vision for strategic and sustainable development of the Olivetti Factories within the frame of the newly acknowledged UNESCO site of Ivrea Industrial City of the 20th Century through a participatory process involving local and international stakeholders. The workshop led to a roadmap defined as the "Living Archive": a vision that sees the territory as the tangible and intangible archive of the Olivetti's heritage.

HIC ET NUNC (Here and Now, in Latin) stands for a design attitude. With this motto, we invited design students to take concrete action, which can be realized in four weeks, to improve the life quality in a refugee camp in Zurich. HIC ET NUNC III is the third workshop of a series, in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts and AOZ Zurich.

Cosenza Selva Oscura is a project held within the Landworks Calabrina workshop Series, conceived for the reactivation of the historical centre of Cosenza. The project features the participative involvement of international architecture and landscape students of the inhabitants to upgrade a degraded square and the construction of a small temporary pavillion.

Edible Eden is a piece made for the 100c Wastewater Bottle Art Exhibition, at K11 Design Store, Hong Kong. Artists and designer were asked to transform a Primvus mineral bottle water. Edible Eden use the bottle as a vase to grow a head of salad with homeopathic doses of human urines.

Hesje, in Norvegian, is a particular type of primitive structure still used today by fisherman to dry fish near the beach. Inspired by the simple and yet elegant archetypical frame of the Hasje, a pavilion was conceived, designed and constructed in the asylum seeker centre of Kaspar, Norway.

HIC ET NUNC (Here and Now, in Latin) stands for a design attitude. With this motto, we invited design students to take concrete action, which can be realized in four weeks, to improve the life quality in a refugee camp in Zurich. HIC ET NUNC II is the first workshop of a series in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts and AOZ Zurich.

HIC ET NUNC (Here and Now, in Latin) stands for a design attitude. With this motto, we invited design students to take concrete action, which can be realized in four weeks, to improve the life quality in a refugee camp in Zurich. HIC ET NUNC II is the second workshop of a series in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts and AOZ Zurich.

"How to Easy Hydroponics" is an instruction manual to promote hydroponic farming in South American's favelas commissioned by the United Nations World Food Program.

Campo Libero (The Innocent House) is a mobile device for reactivating the lands confiscated from the mafia in the south of Italy. It is designed as an off-grid rural mobile pavilion for the Italian organization Libera, which mission is to promote legality by training volunteers, providing legal support and helping refugees working with no rights in the tomato fields.

T(h)un is the design of a shadow line conveyed on top of a thin wooden structure. It's light landscape furniture designed to host an open-air moment of social life, and it has been installed at EXPO 2012 in Milano.

Altari Umili is a street food furniture designed for the common areas of Milano EXPO 2015. The table is designed to celebrate, symbolically, the lay spirituality of food production and the convivial moments of food degustation.

Farm-X is a modular vertical farm concept that shifts the historical dichotomy between production and food consumption. It grows up to 5t / day of fresh food in 1000 Sqm using specific hydroponic farming techniques in a fully controlled environment to maximize the productivity of leaf and fruit vegetables.

Farm-X is conceived as a device for the production of food and the city itself. Farm-X is a reactivation of abandoned warehouses plots. It is designed to operate as catalysts for urban reactivation, providing employment and exchange energy and services within any urban development complex.

Orto Perpetuo is a reflection upon the colours and textures of vegetable gardens. It is a contemporary garden which has come to our homes by way of the countryside. It has adjusted to indoor life through out-of-soil cultivation methods, with the help of artificial light. Its fruits are as little as our teeny-tiny apartments.

Eliooo is an instruction manual to transform an affordable IKEA product into a hydroponic device to grow food at home and, in doing so, transform IKEA into a distributor of a supply of products that do not exist and you into a manufacturer of an idea.

Brick of Marseilles is designed to assemble dry walls that can function as ecological corridors and plug-in infrastructures such as arcades, benches, promenades, and picnic tables. The project is conceived as a participatory factory to disseminate artisanal skills and produce the brick needed to extend the factory itself.

Designed in collaboration with visual artist Roberto DeLuca for the swiss firm das Konzert, 'Hotello', the four sqm unit is conceived to temporarily inhabit the contemporary city's empty lofts.

The device has been designed to activate the interstitial spaces of the city – supermarkets, bus stops, playgrounds – and turns them into productive locations. It can grow up to 200 plants in four square meters by keeping them protected from animals and the city's polluted air. The greenhouse is conceived in a wood framework structure realized with basic timber laths and plexiglass.

The Urban Farmers rooftop farm consists of a 400 square meters industrial installation in Basel, Switzerland, to grow fish and vegetables using aquaponics.

The aquaponic rooftop farm consists of a generic architecture approach, consisting of two pre-fab modules that correspond to the two main feature of the farming program: the greenhouse for the production of fish and vegetables and the containers for all the other activities.

TANTOOO is a fairytale beanbag, designed as a place where read, and write, fairytales.

The trampoline suite hotel is characterized by an architectural shell of over a thousand square meters entirely made of Dupont Corian.

Only Capitalism can smash Capitalism. With this assumption, the exhibition "Revolution to Smash Global Capitalism" at Cabaret Voltaire Zurich was designed to hack IKEA's customer satisfaction policy resulting in zero costs and zero waste for the exhibition.
Indeed, the exhibition scenography is entirely made thanks to the use of IKEA's Trofast boxes, temporarily assembled with zip ties. In this way, the zip ties are afterwards cut off. The boxes were taken back to the store for reimbursement, profiting from the customer satisfaction policy, according to which the exhibition was scheduled.

Hedron is an aquaponic rooftop greenhouse designed to redistribute the concentrated load to a broader surface allowing its installation on any flat rooftop. Its natural cooling system is designed to filter the polluted air by preventing exposure of the harvest to it. The greenhouse estimated to produce up to ten kilograms of fresh crops a day.

Malthus is an in-home aquaponics unit designed for the next generation kitchen or living room. It grows one meal a day: a portion of fish and a side salad. Aquaponics farming is a technique that combines the cultivation of fish with the growing of vegetables. The fish provides rich fertilizer for the plants, and in return, the plants clean the water from the tank. The fish and the plants co-exist in a symbiotic relationship.

Yokalenteri means, in Finnish, night calendar. The project consists of a large inkjet print: one centimetre per day in width and one millimetre per minute of the day, in length.

The Impact Hub is a co-working space, part of a worldwide network. The project consists of the interior design inside two iconic arches under the viaduct, fulfilling two different functional programs: co-working and events.

They say printed magazines are dead. Wired Unplugged is a "how-to" project to give them a second life. Wired Unplugged is a collection of everyday objects designed to be made with pages of the first issue of Wired UK.

Just Undo It is a collection of everyday objects made by folding a hoodie. The project reflects on design, a form of information or narrative that can transform what we can find around us with the idea that design should provide, today, a product "less" rather than a product "more".

Microstructures for instant urbanization, Porta Palazzo's flea market square, Turin. [with Marco Lampugnani]

Human Camouflage, initially designed for a humanitarian organization to demine fields in war zones, aims (symbolically) to camouflage civilians in today's multicultural society.

Italia in Fumo (in Italian "Italy up in Smoke") is a project for the promotion of the Italian Constitution made in collaboration with the graphic designer Peppe Clemente. Its fundamental articles and the rights and duties of the citizens are framed within the graphic device of the EU non-smoking policy. The project involved designing a DIY graphic device to transform all possible citizens as the media to promote one of the most beautiful Constitutions ever written.

Re-Use is designed to empower the user to become an "anticonsumer" and create a notebook with the verso of A4 office paper.
The project started in 2004 to offer a tool to implement tangible ways of approaching environmental sustainability.

A Vertical Public Space. The Wall is an Info Forum: the messages are generated in real-time by a chemical reaction between a computer-controlled UV laser projection and glowing panels. Its constant transience metaphorically suggests the subconsciousness of a city asleep.

Valokalenteri means, in Finnish, "light calendar". It shows the minutes in which the sun is above the horizon at Helsinki latitudes. The project consists of a large inkjet print: one centimetre per day in width and one millimetre per minute of the day in length. The night is displayed in black during the day in white.

Human World aims at displaying the world's political and cultural information on a population basis. The project raises the question of understanding the politics of culture as a demographic challenge. In these cartograms, each country is scaled proportionally to its population: 1 pixel = 1000 people.