Annarita Bianco
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MunichJewelleryWeek2024
Published: 22.02.2024
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Bio
After graduating in architectural design and practicing graphic design I decided to combine practical making and theoric research by training as a goldsmith. At the end of 2019, I founded my studio Merıstėma Lab. Always looking for something that merges technological research and craftsmanship, humanistic studies, and scientific theories. Questioning the matter, seeking its unexpressed values is always my core topic of interest.Statement
About Hold Me series:Cognition is always embodied: the lived body is not merely a physical object but a dynamic structure intertwined with the world and shaped by experience.This holistic perspective reveals a deep bodily knowledge, often inexpressible in words: the body records experiences, emotions, and traumas. It is not merely a container for the mind but actively influences and co-creates our reality. Sensory and perceptual experiences leave imprints not only on our psyche but also on our physicality, continuously shaping cognition. The Hold Me series explores vulnerability as an act of risk, exposure, and partial surrender of autonomy. The human body's inherent fragility is essential to inter-corporeal relationships, as the body mediates between what is internal, hidden, and subjective and what is external, explicit, and observable. This negotiation is necessary yet complex, often fraught with conflict.The pieces materialise a reflection on how, in specific contexts and relationships, the mind and body become trapped in ingrained “postures”—deeply rooted patterns that generate discomfort yet remain challenging to escape. The resin forms, moulded to follow the body's contours, invite touch: they embrace the curves of the neck, hands, fingers, collarbones, and knees. At the same time, the metal elements embedded in the smooth surfaces create an opposing tension—micro-spheres, small cones, and spikes repel the touch, making contact uncomfortable, even unpleasant.Holding these objects is a voluntary yet often painful act. This gesture reflects the intricate relationship between vulnerability and resistance, the longing for connection and the need for protection.
About Morphosis:
Morphosis is a study of aggregation processes and matter generation. The project hybridise natural and artificial growth, dendritic clustering and fractal algorithms, industrial and manual techniques.
The shape of laser-cut stainless steel sheets recalls crystalline structures fragments, portion of a rational and systematic schematization of Nature. The contrast between geometric rigour and chaotic growth is emphasised by the metal concretion that lies beneath the surface:a cryptic nature, hidden at first glance, and only its reflection allows us to observe its appearance.
Electrodeposited matter is moulded by the intensity of the electric field, by voltage variations, by time, in a process of recursive growth that generates uneven and different structures. The copper particles materialise on an abs matrix modelled through fractal generation software, the result is a structure that draws a solid connection between natural growth structures and computational nature.
About Merıstėma Lab:
Blurring boundaries among disciplines, Merıstėma Lab is an experimental design studio. As in an alchemist laboratory, matter changes, substances melt, materials transform and suggestions coming from different fields merge to assume a different state. Like meristem – plants undifferentiated cells capable of cell division- any concept could take a shape that crosses traditional design fields: jewellery, graphic design, objects that hybridize traditional craft and technological progress, analogical and digital, biological and artificial.
About 3020:
The 3020 project is a possible scenario that depicts a future 1000 years from now. It tries to imagine how e-waste, the physical debris of the immaterial digital era, interferes with geological processes.
Inspired by three main lithogenic processes - sedimentary, magmatic, and metamorphic - I have created three different kinds of synthetic rocks, which include USB cable waste. These cables are made up of an alloy of copper and silver. Cut, oxidized, heated, and granulated, the transformed wire is embedded in an epoxy resin casting. These new gems are set on a silver sheet whose shape is the result of two tangent circles which stand for natural and artificial realms establishing a connection first (T brooch set), that goes towards a complete overlap (U brooch set).
Graphical patterns, which are laser engraved on a silver sheet, represent an attempt to put together digital features and natural rock texture: a symbiosis of natural and post-digital fascination.
Parallel layers inspired by sedimentary rock are translated into a corrupted signal, a glitch noise pattern. Porous volcanic rock recalls a dotted pattern which refers to hole-punched cards used in early computers to contain digital data. Deformation waves typical in metamorphic rocks become a wind of bits, a visual representation of digital dataflow filling cyberspace.
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