QUONDAM

QUONDAM borns from the need for experimentation and research of three young Italian Designers and Decorators: Bravo Stefano, Alessia Sarain and Isabella Tosi. The approach to Critical Design, not yet widespread in Italy, is for the group the right way to overcome the oversaturated design situation and the low attention to the Italian artistic culture. Through Critical Design QUONDAM wants to raise awareness about the value of Italian culture in terms of craftsmanship and decoration, as well as the famous art crafts that have characterized the history of Italian know-how applying them to products that deal with sensitive issues at the present society.
QUONDAM is a process of Critical Design that uses Italian artisan techniques as means for its prototypes.
QUONDAM takes what ‘used to be’ and shapes it into what’s going to be.
QUONDAM is changing the perception of handicraft through an up to date approach that offers it new expressive possibilities.
QUONDAM is the encounter of Art, Critics, Design and Technique.

QUONDAM's first analysis is INTIMACY understood as the ability to know ourself, intended as intimate space and intimate time. Following the analysis of personal INTIMACY QUONDAM divided it into four phases as the path the find the knowledge of our own Intimacy:
1. Organize: the thought first of all to outline the goals;
2. Search: information and answers to the remaining questions;
3. Discover: the solution;
4. Know: the outcome of the process and that the outcome leads to more questions ...
Synthesizing it into a collection of four prototypes of 'intimacy furniture' of which the first is based on the first point: 'Organize'.

ORGANO
ORGANO is QUONDAM’s first prototype. The term comes from the Latin 'organize'. In fact, it is connected to the concept of tidying-up but also has a meaning related to living organisms and thus to a more visceral definition.
We live in a society where data are collected in online servers, personal information are spread at the speed of light, communication is in email and instant messaging, but at the same time everything has to be well organized and stored to avoid confusion and to avoid losing information. Despite of this, today every information is available to everyone.
What better furniture identifies in this 'organization' and 'communication'? Always the desks is where we leave our laptop, to compile and organize documents and there are cabinets or drawers for storage. Once upon a time existed a unique furniture that retained and allowed to write letters or sign documents: the Secretaire. With a mysterious and intimate flavors the secretaire has inside its small drawers where you could lay stationery objects and doors to keep personal documents and correspondence in. Lowering the hinged panel you obtained a surface to write. In short, a jewel that has allowed large and small people in the history of exchanging correspondence and preserving important personal information. Therefore the aim is to transform a Secretaire in a Critical Design product where knowledge of their intimacy is tested.

THE ARTISANAL TECHNIQUE OF 'ORGANO'
Deal with our intimacy is not a trivial matter, as already mentioned is a delicate issue that if you run bad it could shatter into a thousand pieces and not be repairable. As a crystal, the intimacy of a person is something so delicate that as they say it should 'be treated with gloves'. To transpose this message in his first project, QUONDAM has revised the right transposition of this theme in the glass that encloses the nature of the intimate fragility and at the same time the high level of Italian craft technique. The search for QUONDAM is not limited to those that are the sensations transmitted by the material, but deepens the technique discovering the history of glass and how it has become one of the most renowned Italian Artisan Techniques: The Murano glass and in particular the Venetian’s stained glass windows.

The QUONDAM project is not only for the design and implementation of 'Organo', but 'Organo' is the result of the process of research and experimentation of QUONDAM which always pass through the documentation and study of forgotten techniques in order to preserve the cultural memory and offer them new expressive possibilities.