By Paolo Ulian.
In just fifty years the consumer non-culture has succeeded in dispersing and making us forget all those little tricks and secrets that people handed down for generations to avoid waste when using materials. Today we throw things out with dismaying ease, and not only in the family. Craft businesses and manufacturers do the same. They fashion handicrafts or products without worrying about the value and potential utility of the waste they produce and eliminate day by day. And designers are particularly wasteful because they fail to devote proper attention to the leftover materials produced by their designs.
I believe designers should be the first to set a good example by their art and sensibility, precisely because their ideas are transformed into real objects and products, in some cases being mass produced. This means that designers themselves abet and are indirectly responsible for the enormous quantities of waste arising from their work.
Angelo Mangiarotti has set a good example in difficult times. It was back in the 1990s when he began working with Carrara marble in workshops equipped with the first machines for cutting stone using numerically controlled diamond wire. Mangiarotti was certainly aware of the quantities of marble waste that finished up in landfills, roughly 70 percent of the material processed in the workshops, a huge figure when you consider its value and uniqueness. He decided to use the new technologies in the most appropriate way by fashioning sculptures without creating waste, so blazing a new trail and setting an example of how to achieve outstanding aesthetic effects using the processed material in its entirety, including leftovers. In these works Mangiarotti has abolished the difference between the marble used and the offcuts. Both are embodied in his sculptures, as presences essential to the completeness of the composition, integrated and synergic.
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