Asylum of Spoons |

I don’t like anonymous and meaningless jewellery pieces that display no creativity behind them or entirely lack personality.

This is the main reason why I often end up doing by myself the accessories I wear, mixing two or three different ideas together and using a variety of materials.

I think a jewellery piece should tell a story, but should also spark up a dialogue and make people smile, that’s why in my previous experiments I used a bit of everything, including dolls' eyes, slides, antennas, old banknotes, strips of 8mm films, magnetic elements, marbles, sand, pencils, buttons, thread reels, metal and plastic buckles, toy cars, cartoon characters, toy soldiers and wooden hands.

Sometimes materials are the first inspiring forces behind my pieces and sometimes they also suggest the theme. Formal invention cannot be separated from the emotional power inspired by the material and by its essential properties, yet the material is never enough to give rise to any result unless it is supported by a series of other ideas that are in my case taken from cinema, ballet, costume design, art or literature.

The latest necklace I created moved for example from cutlery: I wanted to do a jewellery piece that included mainly spoons and that reunited together different ideas and inspirations from Moschino’s Autumn/Winter 1989-90 "Dinner Jacket" with its surreal cutlery replacing decorations and pockets to Jacques d’Esterel’s dresses with jewellery pieces integrating kitchen utensils (check out the first clip taken from the same series of videos embedded in a previous post).

I also wanted to give the piece a deeper meaning that evoked madness and a twisted mind and that came from Allen Kaeja’s choreography (and 2005 film) Asylum of Spoons. This contemporary piece of dance first staged in 2004 revolved around an eccentrically dysfunctional family.

The 2,000 stainless steel spoons surrounding the dancers were conceived as nurturing tools, but also as aggressive weapons, currency and, ultimately, jewellery.

Once I got the main inspirations and theme behind the necklace, I started thinking about a way to put it together since I wasn't convinced by welding the spoons.

One night, re-watching Fritz Lang’s M (M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, 1931), a film suspended between expressionism and noir, I finally found the solution.

At a certain point in the film, serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) stops in front of a window shop and looks at the cutlery on sale neatly and artistically arranged in arches (left side of the first picture in this post). Throughout the entire film Lang used glass and reflections for expressive purposes, but in this scene the director was particularly clever since the camera films the killer from behind the window, while the killer spies a young girl reflected in a mirror inside the window and the pieces of cutlery act as tools that magnify and multiply his madness.

The noir theme inspired also the colour of the felt I used – black – though I opted for golden spoons and chains to call back to mind Moschino's kitsch designs and to give the surreal illusion the necklace is more precious than it actually is (the other day somebody asked me if the spoons were really made of gold so it must have worked…).

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