“Our sea, not in the heavens, embracing the borders of the island and the world.
Blessed be your salt and blessed be your depths.
Welcome the crowded boats without a road upon your waves, the fishermen who went out at night, their nets among your creatures, returning in the morning with the catch of rescued shipwrecked souls.
Our sea, not in the heavens, at dawn you are the color of wheat, at sunset of harvest grapes.
We have sown you with the drowned more than any age of storms.
Our sea, not in the heavens, you are more just than the land even when you raise waves like walls, then lower them like carpets.
Protect the lives, the lives fallen like leaves on the avenue, be their autumn, a caress, an embrace, a kiss on the forehead from father and mother before departing.”Erri De Luca
Attracco Tray Design: it reads the shape of a tablet, a raft, a dock, a pier, a story of the sea, a story in the sea; here is the landscape of the Salento territory that inspires the Design work, it is the water landscape, the ancient sea, the Mediterranean.
The primordial shape of the tray is the flat shape; after all, any rigid plane can “function” as a tray; its variations are essentially of two types, either trays with two cuts, holes, hand-sized openings, or with applied or superimposed handles. It’s all about facilitating the grip.
The Attracco tray was designed to not give up on flatness, to not alter the beauty of a simple object, which to perform its function is sufficient to be flat; this is enough to serve two coffee cups!
It combines the concept of emptying the plane with the reality of a non-real subtraction of matter from the plane itself.
In fact, the Attracco tray is a plane, which it is and remains, and the emptying, without subtraction of material from the plane itself, is only a generator of function without subtraction and without addition of material.
Since Design is not only form, appearance, perception, but also function, in the Attracco tray part of the matter of the plane, of the tabula, generates the function, becomes handle and foot, therefore grip and support.
The development of the project
The development of the project took place through constant interaction of drawings and construction of real models, of experiments and tests with which we wanted to achieve one goal, always the same since the moment of inspiration: to make the starting point and the arrival point coincide as much as possible, to preserve the tabula, the flatness of the work, that is its material continuity, the flat and primordial shape of the tray, its being flat and full by nature, by definition.
Who knows if in the purity, typical of that moment that we call inspiration, it was not the image of the calm sea, of the sea when it looks like a table, that marked the goal, that arrival point that coincides with the starting point!
And who knows if, always in that inspirational moment, there was also the unconscious and pure desire for a sea that should not be scary and for its motion that should never hinder the docking, the landing, the maneuver of connection between boat and pier!
If the “divine intelligence” of the Egyptians, the first sailors in history, witnesses of feelings of homage and admiration for the perfection of the Cosmos, because nature itself seemed to them created by a Great Architect and Mathematician, invented ships, all in wood, for river transport, even before the Egyptian civilization, much further back in time, the boat of primitive men was the raft.
It was and is flat, based on the principle that it is the specific weight of wood, lower than that of water, that allows it to float, the well-known principle of Archimedes.
The Attracco tray is the simplest of boats, it is a raft that wants to recover the memory and history of the migrations of the Mediterranean, the heritage of a land that has always been a place of encounter, alliances, and landings.
It is design, the precious tool with which SKIA Design, in collaboration with Architect Enrico Delapierre, through artistic research, innovation, and engineering of the project, has created a unique product of contemporary creativity, able to tell the connections with the territory and with the intangible heritage.
The theme of the Sea is the focus of the project: we chose to use, in addition to beech wood, an extraordinary material, Baubuche®, whose elegant stratifications recall the line of the sea, the lines of the sea, the light waves of a calm sea.
Both variants of the model contain this reference, one in the central inlay, the other on the 45° edge on the four sides of the tray.
The execution refers to the tradition of wood inlay and cabinet making, the materials are a combination of solid beech and Baubuche®, a material that is anything but traditional, representing instead the modern and innovative guise of beech.
The construction technique is technology and numerical control.
