Matteo Guarnaccia: “Listening means developing empathy”

Born in 1993, Matteo Guarnaccia’s Cross Cultural Chairs. 8 chairs from 8 countries: diversifying modern seating installation went on show at Base Milano back in 2020. It might have been due to our Covid-imposed reduced mobility or to the chairs themselves, always seen as the baptism of fire for any would-be designer, but the exhibition held at the Fuori-Supersalone was a wild media success, going so viral as to cause the author to distance himself from it two years later.  

“The eight chairs have now finally entered the permanent collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht,” said Matteo with a barely perceptible sigh of relief. The ‘Sicilian designer based in Europe’ has been up and down the Old Continent and made his escape to Los Angeles at the tender age of sixteen. Now, in Spain,  he basks in the memory of his native Catania, to which he hopes to return soon. His nostalgia was triggered by a flashback of Milan: “When the event was over, Ikea contacted me and referred to me as the chair ‘boy,’ I realised ‘we’re not there yet.’ In the sense that something wasn’t working on a communication level.” Because the Italian designer, who holds a diploma from IED in Barcelona and a Chair in Graphic Design, has a CV boasting extremely sophisticated research-related delvings. It is perfectly understandable that the field of exploration demarcated by the perimeter of a chair might prove somewhat narrow.  

However, that exhibition in Tortona undeniably shook things up in terms of the discipline of design, readying it for the debate on what are now widely shared reflections among young and not-so young - from climate change to post colonialism, from feminism to non-extractive practices. These are the contemporary urgencies highlighted by Guarnaccia (to which the chairs are testament). “There are eight of them, one for each country: a grand tour that started in Brazil and ended in Nigeria, by way of Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, China, India and Russia. Each piece was made in collaboration with a local studio with which I mapped the cultural accents: each piece is a snapshot that tells of colonisation and capitalism, of craftsmanship and politics, of postures, materials and production processes,” a world map of replicable signs.  

The both fun and universal aspect “was realising just how greatly this piece of furniture, indispensable in the homes of white-heterosexual people, is totally secondary at other planetary latitudes.” It is this sort of awareness that underpins Guarnaccia’s practice: “What relations with space and objects does man need?” A question that intersects with apparently distant disciplines and fields of design, constantly in search  of an answer that is never identity-based but the result of a series of cultural crossings that culminate in an all-round idea, the kaleidoscopic complexity of today.