Urban Matter(s) — Exhibition at Superstudio, Milan Design Week (2022)

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Invited artist to the collective show  “Urban Matter(s) material reduction for a lighter city” curated by Materially and hosted at Superstudio during Milan Design Week 2022.

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Following several projects developed in the United Kingdom, Riccardo Rizzetto made his Italian debut at the first edition of TEDxBassano del Grappa with X, a sculptural work from the Secature cycle — a project that gives new possibility to what is considered obsolete through acts of cutting and reconfiguration.
At Urban Matter(s), this trajectory evolved further, deepening his reflection on sustainable art and the ethics of transformation.

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Rizzetto’s practice operates where ecology, social justice, and the poetics of matter converge. His work proposes sustainability not merely as material recycling, but as a form of re-territorialisation — an imaginative and political act of redefinition. Each piece questions how what has been discarded, broken, or considered obsolete might acquire renewed agency, becoming part of a continuous cycle of change.

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The artist approaches matter as something alive, capable of holding memory and potential.
The gesture of the cut — central to Secature — becomes both subject and instrument of transformation: not a gesture of division, but an opportunity for connection. Drawing on the geometric notion of the secant, the act of cutting is reinterpreted as a unifying movement — a line that intersects, binds, and creates new points of relation.

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As in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, reterritorialisation functions as an engine for becoming.
What was once a non-object (Ferreira Gullar) — marginal, discarded, obsolete — becomes a quasi-object (Michel Serres), an entity charged with relational and symbolic potential.
Rizzetto’s works inhabit this in-between space: neither object nor subject, they oscillate between disciplines and definitions, creating new connective tissue between art, design, and architecture.

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In his practice, matter becomes a site of introspection and transcendence. Through the cut, wounds turn into thresholds — sites where loss, fracture, and vulnerability transform into clarity and renewal. As Rizzetto notes, this process is not one of destruction, but of revelation: “to investigate the soul of materials and, through the cut and the connection, to lead them towards a new existence.”

 

Works on View

For Urban Matter(s), Riccardo Rizzetto presented two works:

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Brexit Chair Italy (2019) — created on invitation from London-based designer Steve Jensen as part of Brexit Chair: A European Creative Collaboration — was shown for the first time in Italy. The work unites twenty discarded chairs, symbolising Italy’s twenty regions, into a single composite structure. The act of cutting and recomposing becomes a metaphor for collective regeneration, transforming fragmentation into a gesture of unity.

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Memento Mundi (2022) — a new, site-specific work produced for this exhibition, it marks the second phase of the Secature cycle. Using the same materials employed in Brexit Chair Italy, the piece imagines a future dimension arising from the reinterpretation of the obsolete.
The work introduces colour — specifically blue — as a symbolic passage: the “moment 0” of a new cycle.
For the Egyptians, blue represented immortality; in Western iconography, faith and transcendence. Here it signifies clarity after turmoil, a space of renewed consciousness.
It is both height and depth, evoking the primordial aquatic state from which life emerged; a maternal archetype of origin and continuity.

 

Golden seams highlight the scars and connections within Memento Mundi, celebrating them as sources of shared strength. From within the cuts, energy radiates outward, transforming wounds into luminous intersections — “floating nodes of possibility” (Vilém Flusser).

 

Memorabilia (2022)  — commissioned installation presented for the first time at Superstudio during Milan Design Week 2022.

Memorabilia takes its title from the Latin memorabilis — “worthy of being remembered” — and reflects on the power of objects as vessels of individual and collective memory.
Each fragment carries the weight of its own history, yet its meaning is continuously reshaped through the gaze of others.
The work invites viewers to engage in this act of reinterpretation — to fill the gaps, imagine the missing details, and project their own narratives.

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As in the fairy tales described by Paul Auster, where sparse words evoke vast imaginative worlds, Memorabilia operates through suggestion rather than description.
Objects act as narrative catalysts — silent protagonists that trigger memory and imagination. They exist between presence and absence, between the personal and the universal, becoming “springboards for the imagination” through which the viewer becomes co-author of the story.

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Together, the three works articulate an ethos of regeneration: material, linguistic, and emotional.
Through the cut, the wound, and the trace, Rizzetto transforms matter into a site of renewal: a geometry of hope and reconnection in an age of fragmentation.

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SELECTED PRESS

La Svolta | esg360 | GreenRetail | BiancoeBruno | Innovatec | RenewableMatter | Haiki+

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Innovatec s. p. a. official project page

Special thanks to Cirucularity and Haiki+ for the commission.

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