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

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.

The Innocent Chair consists of an installation and a book containing the instructions to build ten dwelling devices, pursuing an idea of design that does not produce products but knowledge. Each object is a narrative that establishes an intimate relationship with the reader. Drawings, diagrams, and schematics will tell a visual poem of living made for things that one can build at one wish. Espousing this hypothesis, Antonio Scarponi searched for a humble and most easily worked construction material with which roofs, partitions, cellar doors, and the illusions and hopes of theatrical stages are built. Together with the Innocent Chair, the book contains instructions to build a hanger, a table, a bench, a deckchair, a couch, a table chair, a bookshelf, a cupboard, and a bed.