From an early age we are used to looking at things.

To pick them up, groped to understand how they work.

Trying to take them apart and guessing its hidden structure.

In this way, each of us met for the first and so many other times a simple little item that, since then, in the mental landscape of each one, has become one of the basic elements of the idea and the practice of making and creating.

The screw.

This well known thing.

First of all, it was handled by a mysterious apothecary, the ironware, that sought into wonderful drawers behind him making you leading questions like “Do you need a recessed flat head? ...Self-tapping ...? ...What about the thread? Is it for iron or wood? What step?”.

And then he served you small paper packs full of screws like little bugs. Now these items are available in dizzying outfits, shopping centers or DIY centers: a thousand of cans, whole walls of unrecognizable prisoners to which you have to approach with entomologist’s eyes.

This is the original vision that inspired Carlo Contin: a thread of memory that starts from his father, a great carpenter and cabinet maker, who had the clamping screws that were locking the self-produced wooden workpiece.

This joint through autobiography also becomes a design joint: the theme of the screw becomes the protagonist filtered by the direct observation of the work of Italian design masters (Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti).

No more a simple fixing element but a part of a structural system, which show a repeatable pattern that conceive a variety of household items.

From technical to poetical sign. Without adding anything that is not absolutely necessary.

Large vertical elements that become legs, brackets, pins...

A project that thrives on screwing.

Simple, basic, necessary.

Stefano Maffei