metamorphosis by lorenzo

The Design Story

metamorphosis by lorenzo

Lorenzo Vitturi’s “Metamorphosis” series traces back to the artist’s biographical roots in Italy and Peru, while unveiling the result of collaborations with artisans across Murano, Italy, at Jaipur Rugs in India, and indigenous communities in Chinchero, Peru. The artist enters landscapes embedded in these works as an act of balance and reframing by combining Murano-fused glass, Peruvian yarns, fishing nets, Indian hand-made rugs, eucalyptus wood, and cocaine leaves. The vast textural experience of these materials allows each of them to become silent protagonists that tell multi-layered stories about lived experiences. These experiences are not only those of Lorenzo and the artisans involved in making the work, but also of those who look at these forms and see parts ofthemselves in them. Lorenzo through these life-like forms powerfully re-employs the tradition and knowledge of glass and textile as adaptable mediums often labelled in ‘Western art’ as craft, to imagine new visual languages and encounters between cultures. These suspended sculptures, shapes and materials encapsulate valleys, rivers, and entire regions, creating new geographical configurations and emotional maps. By embracing and abstracting the language of cartographies, Lorenzo questions borders but, above all, attempts to transcend them, to move beyond what separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. Instead, he questions how the fortunate exchanges that emerge from encounters of people and materials alike might be sites for transformation and new routes and where they may lead us.