Hold me, in this delicate balance by Annarita Bianco. A Future Classic in Contemporary Jewellery

A ‘future classic’ is, by its very definition, something that is not yet a ‘classic’. An example of research-driven jewelry that embodies its own time, and that may one day become a model to look to, must stand out for the novelty of its content, for the definition of a style and a language shared by its era, and for its exceptional ability to capture and condense within itself the concerns and urgencies of the contemporary moment. [1]

In a future that is already present, where the debate around avant-garde jewelry has by now become multilingual and polysemic, where the carnality of our bodies (a necessary condition for any discussion of jewelry) dematerializes into the digital, where only the most adamantine conservatives refuse to engage with computer-assisted technologies or take little interest in the range of synthetic materials now available on the market, it is, in my view, necessary to identify new protagonists whose contributions will, over time, reveal their innovative charge.

Meristéma Lab, the name of the laboratory of Avellino-born designer Annarita Bianco (b.1986), operates at the intersection of goldsmithing, graphic design, and speculative design, using craft-based and digital techniques as tools for questioning the possible drifts of the present. Bianco’s jewelry discourse does not stop at the boundaries of its own domain: the ornamental object sets itself up as a device that activates reflection in its audience, taking its place fully within the contemporary art conversation.

In its crossing into disciplines adjacent to the field of jewelry, Meristéma Lab reveals that it has inherited and internalized a by-now historicized body of approaches, placing itself in continuity with the generations of great twentieth-century pioneers and masters. A daughter of very different historical circumstances, Bianco goes further, taking an interest in those schools of thought that shed light on the shadows of our century. The work of Meristéma Lab compels us to ask how humanity is situated, and how it might come to be situated, in an era overwhelmed by uncertainty at the dizzying advance of new technological actors, and set against an increasingly and starkly catastrophic climate destiny.

In continuity with an evolving discourse initiated in the second half of the last century, the Hold Me collection (2025) developed by Bianco revisits and enriches the discussion on the centrality of the theme of the Body. [2]


Meristéma Lab / Annarita Bianco. Hold Me collection, 2025. Resin, silver, stainless steel.


A body that, from a mere exhibition space for jewelry, becomes here a subject of analysis, implicated as much in the ideation process as in the gestational one. A body understood as “living”[3], “sentient”[4], exposed, and vulnerable, which records and makes manifest the weight of our experiential baggage.

As explored in the studies of Dutch-American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, “the body keeps the score” [5] of what happens to it: when struck by trauma, it is altered in the balance of its biological functioning, redrawing the way it moves through space and even rewriting the mechanisms of thought.

Jewelry (which in this series becomes such only when placed in relation to the anatomy) is traditionally the wearable reminder of our affective bonds. In this sense, the pieces that make up the Hold Me collection do not carry the memory of a particular person, but become a metaphor for interpersonal dynamics and for the contradictions that dwell within the human need for communication. The encounter with the other, Bianco reminds us, is not linear, but built on an interplay of tension, activated at once by feelings of desire and rejection, driven by an instinctive craving for connection and held back only by an equally natural need for self-preservation.

Meristéma Lab / Annarita Bianco. Hold me, in this delicate balance, 2025. Resin, silver.


Corporeality, as the dynamic place in which the continual transformation of the self unfolds, and human skin, understood as both organ and threshold where the encounter with otherness takes place, are suggested here by the consistency and the pinkish color of the resin used to make the pieces.

The generative process, too, starts from the body and returns to it: in the piece Hold Me, in this delicate balance, for example, the primary form is modeled on the hand like clay, then scanned, modified, and prototyped by extrusion using FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) technology, and tested once more against the anatomy of the body. The process repeats until its final definition, in a logic of continual back-and-forth between manual and computer-based practices. The silicone mold finally makes it possible to replace the PLA model with the more ‘epidermal’ material of resin, into which the silver elements are set: fields of small studs disturb the pleasantness of contact with the object and temporarily imprint on the skin the memory of its passage.

Historicized reference points of contemporary jewelry—classics, we should say!—that revolve around the theme of corporeality (from Gijs Bakker’s Shadow Jewelry to Peter Skubic’s Jewellery Under the Skin, from Gerd Rothmann’s precious imprints to Christoph Zellweger’s Body Pieces, to name only a few) prove that Hold Me, in this delicate balance, finds, together with its sister works, “its place in the genealogy”[6], that is, it “keeps the score”[7] of the contributions that preceded it... And whether it will prove to be a classic, we shall discover in the future, when its re-reading adds new interpretive opportunities that will allow for an unprecedented (re)discovery.


Meristéma Lab / Annarita Bianco. Hold me, in this delicate balance, 2025. Resin, silver.


Notes
[1]: T.S. Eliot, What is a Classic?, in On Poetry and Poets, London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1957, pp. 53-71.
[2]: The Hold Me collection originated from an experience abroad, from September to December 2024, at the Somaesthetic Design Research Group of Swedish researcher Kristina Höök, Professor of Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The project was carried out externally to and in parallel with the doctoral research Somatic jewels and Objects for Interspecies Living, in Design for Made in Italy: Identity, Innovation and Sustainability at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli (2022-2025). The series was first exhibited in Outer Casing, curated by Letizia Maggio and Raquel Bessudo, as part of Munich Jewelry Week 2025 (March 13-16, 2026); it was partially featured in Forms of Contemporary Heritage, curated by Eliana Negroni, AGC Associazione Gioiello Contemporaneo, organized at the JCC International Contemporary Jewellery Center, Shenzhen (March 21 – June 21, 2026) and at Legnica International Jewellery Festival SILVER 2026 (May 8 – July 19, 2026). The series is currently divided, engaged between Gallery Metabo in Kyoto (October 24 – November 3, 2026) and Hannah Gallery in Barcelona, where the piece Hold me, just one more time was selected for the professional category of the 29th edition of Enjoia’t Contemporary Jewellery 2026.
[3]: Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, Soma Design: On Articulation, Materiality, Politics, and the Body. Interview with Kristina Höök, in «Diseña», 20, Interview.1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.20.Interview.1 (Accessed September 25, 2026).
[4]: Ibidem.
[5]: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, New York, Viking, 2014.
[6]: Italo Calvino, Perché leggere i classici, Arnoldo Mondadori, Milano, 1991, p.16. [Translation by the author].
[7]: B. van der Kolk, 2014.



Why Future Classics?
What Makes a Contemporary Jewellery Piece Become a Classic? Our aim is not to define academic criteria or impose any form of conservatism, but to collect subjective perspectives that help us understand the values and expectations shaping our field, without reducing them to fixed rules or hierarchies. By sharing these voices, we invite you to think together and open a conversation about durability, relevance, and the ways particular works contain certain patterns or enigmas that make them continue to speak over time.


 

About the author

Alice Rendon is an Italian art historian specialized in the history of contemporary jewellery. She holds a Master's degree (with Honours) in Art History from the University of Florence, with a thesis on the twentieth-century artists' jewellery collection of Palma Bucarelli, historic director of GNAMC in Rome. Since 2020, she has been teaching Contemporary Jewellery History at Le Arti Orafe School in Florence, for which she co-curated Florence Jewellery Week 2022 and has been serving as curator of the PREZIOSA YOUNG project since 2020. Since 2023, she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the Lorenzo de' Medici Institute in Florence.

Contact: rndn.alice@gmail.com