M - Cose in piedi [standing things]
2025 - in progress
M3 (MEDITERRANEAN SEA+MATTER+MEMORY) = W(EIGHT):V(ALUE)
The magic formula of a transformation guided by sustainability.
Investigating Transformation means understanding the time we live in. It means activating an “alchemical metamorphosis,” that transformative process of matter which alters the form of things and overturns their sense and meaning. With the collection “Cose in piedi” (Standing Things), Thierry Konarzewski sets out on this path, proposing a family of objects with renewed forms that resisting the destiny of becoming “dead things,” stretched out along the seashore, abandoned, adrift. The artist—like an alchemist of the present time—sets them upright again and, through variations, recombinations, and integrations, transforms them while preserving their vital core, that thread which, through change, remains the same: giving new life to plastic through an artistic touch that has always characterized Thierry Konarzewski’s artifacts. An eclectic and astonishing continuity that generates that “wonder” which, already for Aristotle, constituted the spark of knowledge.
The creative idea, with the three overlapping Ms, arises from a reflection: matter is not exhausted by the question of form versus function, but implies a process in which what is tangible is transformed into value. The English term matter means material, but also what counts, what generates meaning. The meaning attributed to “Cose in piedi” makes it possible to hold together concreteness and abstraction, inviting us to view art and design not so much as disciplines, but as embodied thoughts, capable of traversing materials and meanings, restoring depth to the act of regenerating waste.
In “Cose in piedi”, within an affective weave that crosses the landscapes of art and the environment, we thus find a new interpretation of recycling, under the sign of a Poetic Craftsmanship, of making with the hands: at the moment when the artist intervenes on the forms of matter, already eroded by the labor of the sea, he transfers into his works the lost value of a memory that does not die.
Linda Gobbi - sociologist and essayist / Future Concept Lab
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M means sea, matter, memory (mer, matière, mémoire). This project is the result of a reflection started in 2000, in parallel with my photographic work on the ENOSIM series. I collect fragments of plastic in the Mediterranean Sea, anonymous remains that the sea polishes and returns. A repetitive and intentional gesture to transform them today into a community of “Standing Things,” presences that are simultaneously sculptural and domestic, whose form is born from the exact quantity of matter mobilized.
This is not a meditation on pollution, but an attempt to offer a new cultural dignity to that which is surplus. The works in this collection preserve the visual memory of another function: nameless objects that become signs, silent bodies continuing to breathe in space.
I chose to name each work according to an industrial lexicon: the letter M followed by the net weight (M324, M735, M1448…). This number is a mute index that does not explain, but measures and annotates. Like plastic itself, standardized and serial, each work bears its quantitative origin inscribed within it. These materials are not guilty waste, but by-products of a cycle: manufactured, consumed, discarded then redistributed by the currents. By associating a letter with a weight, I sought to symbolically intertwine production, accumulation, and transformation.
Each object becomes the prototype, the evidence of a possible whole. For me, to stand upright means to endure. No longer useful, yet present, still capable of inhabiting this world and generating meaning.
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