Giovanni Botticelli | HABITAT

Swing Design Gallery is pleased to present Habitat, designer Giovanni Botticelli’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Giovanni Botticelli’s new project returns to and expands on the dialogue forged with the space and the interaction between the spectator and object that he developed in EQUILIBRISTA, the collection of mirrors he made for Swing Design Gallery in 2016. HABITAT started to take shape in 2017, stemming from his in-depth research on applying techniques and materials for eyewear manufacturing to interior design objects. Botticelli revisits a material he knows well, cellulose acetate, striving to combine concepts, design, and formal purity. He specifically focuses on welding and bending techniques. He combines two or more colors by joining acetate slabs through compressed acetone. Thermal bending is the technique commonly used for curved-front eyewear. The color palette he uses also draws on independent eyewear design, featuring clean contrasts between tan, transparent monochromes, and opaline colors. The installation resulting from this in-depth investigation is presented as a scaled transposition of architecture’s typical expressions and forms, suggesting correspondences between essential style codes and pure geometric shapes. Displayed in the gallery are wall bookcases, tables, and boxes — furnishings conceived as places where memories dwell, places meant to safeguard the precious memory of our things. Botticelli has created a family of interior micro-architecture that seems to emerge from the fragments of imagined buildings. In his collection, the absolute precision of design meets experimentation to raise the material’s creative potential. The HABITAT collection was designed exclusively for SWING Design Gallery and produced in a limited and numbered edition. We would like to thank Mazzucchelli 1849 for its support. This long-established company in Castiglione Olona was founded in 1849 as a small factory for the production of horn and bone combs and buttons. Now it is a world leader in the production and distribution of cellulose acetate.