Objects carry time in ways that words cannot. They are a form of knowledge, precise and irreplaceable. I collect them because I don’t want that knowledge to disappear. Because I don’t want the relationship with the past to disappear. Every object I work with has passed through other hands before mine. Someone made it. Someone used it. Someone kept it. Someone found it again. I am not the beginning of that story, nor the end.

The process is closer to writing than to design. Every element, colour and position carries weight and meaning. It takes time. It takes attention. It takes removing what is superfluous until everything finds its balance. The gesture, though, is always imperfect, always made by hand. And that is not a flaw. It is the work.

I think about the objects I transform and imagine whoever possessed them, someone I will never know except through the things they tended and kept close. Who considered them precious. Then comes an era in which everything is discarded. Replaced. Without gratitude. Care slips away. Attachment slips away.

So I turn to imagination. A place without rules, boundaries or assumptions. Only form, colour and language. From that place, everything can be reinvented. From here come objects that are alive, that generate relation and ask for participation. To be seen, used and tended. They pass into other hands, and I am certain those hands will treat them with the same care.

I studied Design and Communication. For over ten years I worked for fashion houses across Italy and Europe. In 2012 I opened Manoteca in Bologna, an experimental workshop where objects bound to memory and the imperfect human gesture take on new form. My work has been published by Logos in a monographic volume and exhibited at the Triennale di Milano, in the exhibition dedicated to Italian women’s design of the twentieth century. I make pieces for designers and collectors around the world