Kefa is an outdoor seat in stone and solid wood: a figure of speech representing the apostle Peter, the first pope, through the use of two archaic and symbolic materials, wood and stone.
The seat is made solely of these two materials, joined together by a longitudinal groove cut into the stone, which serves as the support for the seat, formed by a trapezoidal prism.
More explicitly, the form represents an architectural fragment — a plinth or a pillar with its beam — while the allegory represents the Church, which originates from Peter, on whom it is said "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church": the stone material is enduring, and it protects the organic material resting upon it from decay, in contrast to the wood, which is more exposed to attack and disintegration.
His stony nature
On the permanence versus obsolescence of objects.
Alessandro Marelli's Kefa project clearly addresses the concept of "stoniness" — the idea of duration and permanence in objects designed within the discipline, materialising in the processes by which we humanise environmental space. Its hybrid nature, poised between metaphor, pragmatic experimentation and conceptual exercise, brings out a question that matters to the discipline: the primal, design-founding dimension of choosing a material and the natural form that follows from it, appropriate to the function that form gives rise to.
It is the approach of an experimenter with constructive systems, almost Vitruvian (...Alessandro is an architect... even though he isn't), isolating a simple physical-static principle: the same principle that links him to the layered, centuries-old spontaneous practices of observing and using the elementary resources available in a given territory, found across many societies and cultures, within the processes by which civilisation evolves and material practices and cultures take shape and settle.
Here the allusion is direct: the representation of a beam resting on two supports, which lies at the foundation of our history of building, and which brings us back — with a contemporary critical eye — to the theme of the material and formal obsolescence of the objects that surround us.
Yes, obsolescence. Because what we are talking about here is not planned obsolescence but, on the contrary, a natural one, following the rules — environmental and of use — of the place and of the people who will use this object. Alessandro therefore works with a classical idea of obsolescence, proper to an approach to historicisation that looks to the logic of the longue durée rather than the événementielle, finding also in the symbolic nature of the materials used an echo of the processes of humanisation and identity-building of the Mediterranean area.
We might therefore find this object, stripped almost animistically of every ornamental element, in each of the civilisations that developed archaically in this geographic area. And we might also imagine it as the result of an anonymous, spontaneous, self-built act of materialisation.
And so glimpse it, just as Alessandro has designed it, at the edge of a path, at a scenic viewpoint in the countryside, or on some hill. Or in the private, service area of some ancient ruin. In its most natural form: weathered, altered, adapted. With a story to tell. Like that of Peter and his church.
— Stefano Maffei
