Chil-dish: a soapstone collection to play with

This article was originally published on Domus 1063, December 2021.

Chil-dish – a pun alluding to childhood (childish), but also to food (dish) – is the latest experiment of Maddalena Selvini with soapstone, a material this young designer has explored and worked with for eight years now, since she graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven.

At first, she designed a series of pots (S-pot), followed by an investigation of the heating properties of this stone (used as a heater) and by salvaging the discards, such as pure powder, which at 1,200 degrees is recompacted and takes on different colours that render it precious. “I’ve never truly abandoned this research,” she says. “This latest design is like a game, it’s playful. It takes advantage of a characteristic of the stone I adore: the fact, since it is uniform and changes colour – with water, sweat or grease – you can draw on top of it. Since it’s soft, it’s one of the few stones you can lathe by hand with great precision.” Chil-dish includes a series of pots and table accessories that encourage interaction. Even though they are not games, they leave lots of room to creativity.

There are five objects. There’s the breakfast set: plate, glass and bowl that can be stacked, like a building set. Then we have the nutcracker and boxes with a pivot inside upon which the lid revolves. Spinning plate, on the one hand, is an ordinary serving dish but when you turn it upside-down its surface is concave and is ideal for a toy top. The final piece, a cup with large side handles, is in porcelain combined with recompacted soapstone powder.

“Soapstone is a very valuable material,” continues Selvini, “the quarries are small and few (there is one in Chiavenna, where the stone is grey, and another in Valtellina, with green stone). That’s why it’s only used by artisans. It’s valuable also because it’s the artisan who quarries it. But it lasts a lifetime and it’s a very poetical material, which listens to the body; it’s porous and soft, embraces the fingerprints of the artisan, and just a little water is needed to draw on it. It absorbs everything, but all you need is some warmth and it’s like new”.