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OGGETTARIO. STORIE E BIOGRAFIE DI OGGETTI
2025
The exhibition, entitled “Oggettario. Stories and Biographies of Objects”, which we curated and produced in collaboration with Product Design students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce—Francesca Girardi, Chiara Lorusso, and Sian Price—and with Cherrys Alabro, teaching assistant for the Product Design course at the Academy of Fine Arts of Foggia, and organized and produced by Agorà Design, originated during the preparation of the festival of the same name. It arose from the need to present the perspective of ordinary people on necessary objects, to complement that of designers and professionals in the field of design.
To develop the exhibition content, testimonies, questions, and reflections on necessary objects were collected and later organized into new categories defined by words describing emotions. Among these, the most frequent was “love,” followed by “affection,” “nostalgia,” “happiness,” “pride,” and many others. Without aiming to establish an object-based taxonomy, a sort of catalog was created based on the declared nature of the relationship between human beings and objects—an “Oggettario” of the “necessary useless.”
The exhibition was not intended to provide answers but rather to raise questions and, above all, to evoke emotions and reflections on the value of objects in our lives, as well as on their existence and persistence over time as a cultural system.
Not only because we cannot do without objects, but also because, as Latour states, “objects do something, and first of all, they make us ourselves.” (B. Latour, 1993, p. 22)
