RESPIRO

There are moments when the hands no longer guide, but listen. Respiro was born in one of those moments—a silent exchange between me and the wood, where the gesture dissolved into presence. Its form, smooth and elliptical like a pebble shaped by countless waters, holds within it the slow memory of a tree, the breath of its long, invisible life.

I chose not to separate, not to select. Every part of the trunk is here, from pith to bark, intact. To me, it is an act of trust, of belonging. The grain is not decoration: it is story. It is the entire, unrepeatable journey of what once lived rooted in the earth. At its core, the opening breathes—a space that does not empty, but speaks. A place where what was hidden can surface, without effort.

And then, as the wood dried and settled, something unexpected happened. A shift, a yielding, a sudden descent along one side—as though some unseen hand had traced its will upon the surface. In the photographs, this secret movement barely reveals itself; in reality, it is profound. I watched it happen with a quiet sense of awe. It was as if the piece had leaned into a dream I hadn’t dared to articulate, realizing it on its own, beyond my hands. A rare moment of grace.

Respiro is this: a unique, unrepeatable gesture, the clearest expression of everything I have searched for in my years of work. A threshold where strength and fragility meet, where memory becomes form, and time holds its breath—just for a moment—before moving on.

From this point I realized that I needed to quit my previous expectations and look for a way to summarize that feeling with a gesture. I went when the tree was uprooted to collect some tuff to be used directly on the piece after the drying process. I felt a little forced because I have never employed decoration on wood before in order to respect its pure visual aspect. But in this particular case it was different and I found the courage to practice that decoration. I wanted the earth, the tuff in this case, became a symbol of hope, the human will that bends in front of a request of nature, renouncing his own expectations and reconnecting to a deeper message, that of respect.