THE INNOCENT CHAIR (and Other Stories).
Installation and Instruction Book.
Konzepthaus Laboratorium, Thun, Switzerland.

Two men meet in an abandoned countryside, in the shade of an olive tree—or perhaps under a rusty sheet-metal roof. One is a farmer. The other is a lawyer. The farmer seeks help; the lawyer is a volunteer for an organization that reactivates land confiscated from the mafias and advises farmers on how to begin a path toward legality.

This scene is fictional, emerging from Antonio Scarponi’s design imagination. Yet it became a clear and persistent image while he was working on a mobile pavilion intended to host encounters of this kind in southern Italy—imagining relationships built on courage, legality, and mutual support.
Within this imagined context, Scarponi began to reflect on the symbolic form of a chair: a minimal device placed where two people might sit, meet, and speak. From this reflection, The Innocent Chair emerged as a symbolic object—not as an act of acceptance, but as a way to transform the small portion of the world that lies within one’s reach.

The Innocent Chair (and Other Stories) consists of an installation and a book containing instructions to build ten dwelling devices. The project pursues an idea of design that produces knowledge rather than objects. Each device is conceived as a narrative, establishing an intimate relationship with the reader through drawings, diagrams, and schematics that form a visual poem of inhabitation.
The book includes instructions to build a hanger, a table, a bench, a deckchair, a couch, a chair, a bookshelf, a cupboard, and a bed. All objects are designed using humble, easily workable materials commonly employed for roofs, partitions, cellar doors, and theatrical scenography—materials associated with provisional structures, labor, and expectation.

Expose - The project exposes an ethical and political condition through a symbolic narrative and a minimal object—the chair—placed within a fictional yet plausible social scenario.

Mediate - Through the instruction book, the project mediates architectural and design knowledge, translating an imagined condition into reproducible procedures that can be enacted independently by others.

Activate - The Innocent Chair activates the possibility of encounter, agency, and making—both through the installation and through the invitation to build and inhabit the proposed devices.