Ice Cubes in Venice

THE DESIGNER

Annalisa Lago is CEO of Azimut Design, a brand she founded together with her life partner Francesco Benedini, a designer from Verona. A totally Italian production reality in which the artisan experience, technological innovation and a deep knowledge of materials, have been interacting for over twenty years in the continuous search for excellence for the design of spaces and furnishings tailored to customers and their desires.

Resin is the material lens that Azimut Design chooses to interpret the habitat of emotions with creations that stand out for their three-dimensionality and transparency, transmitting in the observer a sense of belonging to the materials that is completely unique and unusual.

The headquarters of the brand is located in San Giovanni Lupatoto, on the outskirts of Verona and looks like an immense living room of the elements in which the most original materials can be found, such as precious metals and woods, fabrics and fibers from all over the world. The experimentation of the chemical compositions of the resin has led Azimut Design to establish itself everywhere as a leading company in the treatment of this material, whose production process is very long and entirely handmade by skilled craftsmen.

Recycling is an important focus for the brand which elevates the vitreous resin to a “time capsule”, capable of ensuring a new and lasting life cycle for each immersed material.

If the craftsmanship of the highest level has allowed Azimut Design to establish itself on the home furnishing scene, the multifaceted face and the innovative approach to materials have certainly sanctioned its greatest successes at an international level with collaborations that see it as a production and design partner of important names in luxury and fashion. Among the most famous: Galeries Lafayette, Bottega Veneta, Nike.

THE INSTALLATION ON BOARD

Two months of navigation, from July to September 2022. The sea journey of Annalisa Lago’s works on board the beautiful wooden gulet Lycian Princess lasted that long. Second protagonist of my itinerant art project “Artista a Bordo”, Annalisa immediately accepted my invitation to the sea with enthusiasm.

Her idea was to create a material suggestion for the boat thanks to the incorporation into the transparent resin of glass scraps that she had personally collected on the island of Murano. Often abandoned in large chests in the external courtyards of the furnaces, the flakes of cotisso appear to the designer as fragments of an endangered creative memory that needs not only to stay afloat, but to continuously structure and recompose itself above the surface of the sea.

Annalisa Lago thus set sail on the first days of July, installing on board the Turkish caique what appeared to be an interlocking game made up of blue, light blue and gray totems which, in the form of cubes of various sizes, stood out against the horizon. On the top of each figure, a detachable geometric complement recalled, thanks to its transparency, the glow of the sea foam.

In order to be able to easily move each work within the nautical spaces, each structure was made of wood, covered in resin and finally polished. The extreme freedom to compose and decompose the installation in ever-changing points of the boat and thus redistribute its volumes and perspectives transformed the people who lived on the boat into potential protagonists of the frozen mirage that the artist wanted to achieve.

The two small tables that Annalisa Lago has created for the opposite ends of the boat are not only suggestive but also functional for the voyage: if the one in the bow, recalling the shape of an icy wave, recalled a concept of regeneration and momentum, that of stern was characterized by a treated green moss coating and ideally led the observer to meditate on their origins.