Laying eyes on these objects provokes an immediate effect: empathy. A sweet sensation, born out of the precarious balance between cause and effect, aesthetic emotion and the perception of everyday form. It is art one can sit on—the perfect object. Because these stools, half fetish, half functional, speak to us like a written text on the Amazon and the other indigenous lands, ethnicities, rituals, symbols, and also local savoir-faire.
Some years ago, design began to value craft traditions, local heritage and small-scale production. The value of objects lies, more and more, in their evocative power. Form and function acquire meaning when linked to the users of objects, highlighting the emotional, affective relation between men and the material world. The things around us are transformed into important witnesses to the past and present, and frequently—thanks to the creative mediation of the artisan, artist or designer—have an educational and therapeutic value to those who observe, analyze or simply use them.
Objects are an expression of a culture, of a vision of the world, of habits and lifestyles. This material dimension, formerly scorned, is today considered a fundamental element of our identity and diversity. Because its mission, more or less direct, is to accompany or expose, with no mediation or filter, the necessities and desires of an era, a status, an ethnicity.
This is what happens here. The gesture is impregnated with popular culture, the hand is guided by an instinctive technique passed down from generation to generation, and the iconography is that of the people and ethnicities of the Amazon and the Brazilian forests.
We are talking about empathy: the objects constructed with intelligence of execution demonstrate a dynamic of exchange and reciprocity with the observer/user. They are utilitarian and poetic interfaces, receptacles of memories; they reflect us and, through them and our experience, we are able to build our identity.
This set of indigenous stools, collected with admirable meticulousness by BEI, tells us the history of these peoples—one not found in official historiography—and reveals their vision of the world. They are references created by an imperfect art, simple but real, honest, authentic.
Popular ritual objects, treasures of undeniable anthropological value, pioneers of contemporary design in the emotional balance between aesthetics and functionality, these stools lead us to the kernel of a fundamental question: handcrafts, design, art and their primordial responsibility in the quality of the relation with the other (man, nature), of which the object is at the same time fruit and privileged vector.
Being able to “touch” these works with the eye is a gift offered to us by a generous operation of sharing and the saving of a heritage at the same time tangible and intangible. The text I now write adds nothing to the expressive force of these objects that, like a set of words, create a living syntax, a comprehensible and universal language. Listen to what is told...
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