Formafantasma: Craftica

During next week's Design Miami/Basel, Eindhoven-based design studio Formafantasma and Italian fashion design brand Fendi will present Craftica, a new body of work exploring leathercraft in dialogue other hand-worked, natural materials. Craftica is included in Fendi's Design Performance program, which since 2009 has offered audiences a view into the designers' workshops through the use of discarded Fendi materials and live demonstrations of the processes by which craft-based design work is made.

For the project, Formafantasma's Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin utilized leather left over from the Fendi manufacturing processes at the foundation of the collection and drew on the brand's in-house craftsmen for certain phases of production. In addition to this, the designers selected a range of leathers obtained form fish skins discarded by the food industry, vegetal processed leather using natural substances from tree bark, cork leather extracted from cork trees, and a series of animal bladders investigated for their abilities to hold liquids. The leathers have been paired with marble, oxidized metal, glass, wood and other unprocessed natural materials such as bones, shells and a sponge cultivated in a sea-farm as a substitute for industrial foam.

The installation will display a variety of objects ranging from tools to furniture: a collection of glass lights hung via belts and hooks; a table and room divider produced from vegetal tanned rawhide stretched over brass structures with marble weights; a series of four stools characterized by organic forms and fin-like legs upholstered in fish leather; spoons and protective masks made with scallop-shells; and, jar-like containers in glass and cow bladders. Keeping with the "leather" theme, twenty-eight drawings are displayed on parchment (a strong paper made by processing hairless goat skin) portraying the many uses of leather though out history.