fabio novembre + mathieu lehanneur + nendo: bohemian rhapsody for lasvit

‘bang’ by fabio novembre for lasvit
image © designboom

‘bohemian rhapsody’ is the result of a project initiated by czech glass and lighting company las vit in collaboration with italian designer fabio novembre. for the occasion of milan design week 2011, novembre curated a presentation asking french designer mathieu lehanneur and japanese designer nendo to each produce a glass blown piece that represents concepts of love and light, the idea of the cocoon and the symbol of an anticipated metamorphosis. cocoons are the core element of ‘bohemian rhapsody’, the chrysalis representing the last step before the metamorphosis, the waiting and the wish of a new birth: suspended in glass and metal, fecundated by light, representing the metamorphosis of the world, the ongoing changing of life that glass embodies so perfectly…

detail of ‘bang’
photo by pasqsuale formisano / courtesy of lasvit

fabio novembre on the collaboration:
blowing glass has remained one of the most fascinating procedures to create artworks. drawing incandescent matter with thin metal pipes from a big furnace, contemplate gestures that are at the same time
powerful and delicate. and final results are always and anyway one of a kind, like birth. lasvit is a neologism obtained through the combination of the two words laska+ svit (love+light), and my attempt was to combine the two things together. involving mathieu lehanneur and oki sato (nendo), two designers that I really admire, is a way of exploring the borders of the material through the different sensibilities that we all have. naming this experimental, nonfunctional design process after the famous song, is an attempt to recreate the same unexpected and unconventional structure of a rhapsody with the bohemian excellence of lasvit.

‘bang’ changing color throughout the show
image © designboom

‘in geometry, a platonic solid is a regular convex polyhedron and its faces are congruent regular polygons. the dodcahedron is a platonic solid that plato himself, in his phaedo, associated with the shape of the universe.according to the big bang theory, the universe was originally in an extremely hot and dense state that expanded rapidly. ‘bang’ represents a universe in a state of tension halfway between the rigid geometry of theory and the melting state of reality, halfway between an implosion and an explosion. ‘bang’ is the solid sound of evolution.’ – fabio novembre

installation view of ‘bohemian rhapsody’
image © designboom

video by designboom

fabio novembre
portrait © designboom

‘growing vases’ by nendo for lasvit
image © designboom

‘we were assigned the abstract theme ‘cocoon’, and asked to create work that would directly convey the quixotic appeal of glass as something that is impractical and incomplete, but provides a breath of fresh air, opening up new possibilities. we decided to take the brief in a playful direction, and to suggest both breathing and the incomplete by displaying the metal pipes used by glassblowers, still attached to the glass objects that they were used to make. by turning the pipes into flowers and branches and the glass into a vase, we literally turned convention on its head, making flowers blooming in vases into vases blooming from flowers to represent the flower bulbs that draw nutrients from plants through photosynthesis and store new life. ’ – nendo

full view of ‘growing vases’
image © designboom

worm’s eye view of the ‘bulbs’
image © designboom

image © designboom

video by designboom

‘sometimes the world is reduced to several large families: plant; animal; mineral. but it is the non-indentified organisms which escape this division. living objects disrupt these established boundaries. soft geometry being an example of that. halfway between quartz and gas, between mineral and animal, soft geometry is a stone which thinks and breathes. it was first noticed somewhere in bohemia. it is difficult to know if it marks the beginning of a new cycle or if it is a vestige from a previous one…’ – mathieu lehanneur