Founded in 2020 by Marco Sartori and Enricomaria Todaro, Asform Atelier is a curatorial laboratory that looks at 20th-century design with fresh eyes. Its mission? To give voice to forgotten objects, tell untold stories, rediscover marginalized or overlooked figures, without geographical boundaries. While Italy remains one of the focal points of the research, the project also embraces international design.
At the heart of the project is a living and evolving collection, composed of authentic pieces that span decades and borders. It's not just about objects, but about stories to be preserved and shared. Each piece is investigated within its context, its function, its formal language, becoming the starting point for a broader narrative on the project's significance in the material culture of the last century.
Through the Instagram profile @asform.atelier, the collection comes to life with informative content that intertwines vintage images, critical analysis, and anecdotes. The approach is educational with the goal of educating the eye and stimulating curiosity. Asform Atelier transforms Instagram into a dynamic archive, accessible to all.
The project also extends into the field of scenography and styling, offering selected pieces for photo shoots, audiovisual productions, and installations. Objects full of memories are thus reused in contemporary contexts, acquiring new meanings. Some of them are available for sale or rent, also through platforms like Catawiki.
Asform is a tribute to an innovative type of steel, widely used in the 1960s for its elasticity and ability to shape what was previously unthinkable. Atelier, on the other hand, evokes the place of doing, designing, and building with care. Together, the two terms perfectly synthesize the essence of the project: a contemporary workshop where each object becomes an opportunity to rediscover, reflect, and enhance.
Objects that tell stories, images that evoke, stories that resurface from the margins. To delve into the heart of the project, we asked the founders some questions that dig into the vision, approach, and future desires of this unconventional curatorial workshop.
#1 answer
Your work rewrites a narrative of design through marginal or forgotten objects: how much does the "out of focus" weigh in the reading of the Twentieth Century today?
The "out of focus" is, for us, an essential key to understanding.
Anonymous objects, prototypes never produced, or projects that escaped the canon are fundamental to understanding the history of 20th-century design. A history that certainly manages to reach the general public thanks to the strength of iconic pieces produced by design masters and companies that have made the concept of industrial design objects important, but we must not lose sight of the "undergrowth" made up of products of very high quality.
Rereading them means dismantling the idea of linear design, made only of signatures and icons. The Twentieth Century, when observed in this way, is more complex, more human, it is a design made of stories and relationships. Because it is the relationships that generate the most successful projects and leave a mark on the people who come into contact with them.
#2 answer
Treat objects as bearers of stories rather than as collectible pieces. How can storytelling give meaning to an otherwise invisible project?
Storytelling is our way of restoring dignity and importance to what has not become mainstream and therefore disseminated. Telling its story means giving it a voice, bringing it out of silence, and connecting it to those who look, read, imagine.
Objects are not just collectible pieces, so their aesthetic value becomes not the only yardstick but one of the various tools to judge their goodness. Together, the historical production moment, the path of the individual designer and the company itself, the motivations underlying the project's birth, and the needs that led to its coming into the world should be considered.
They are no longer just beautiful, proportionate, elegant. They acquire greater significance in the eyes of an observer aware of the history they carry with them.
#3 answer
In your feed emerges an almost cinematic sensitivity: what role does visual imagery play in your research and dissemination?
Every object is a potential frame, every post a small screenplay. Our goal is not to document, but to evoke: to create a perceptual field in which the project becomes an experience. Therefore, the care in photographing details and sometimes secondary parts is part of this narrative.
Building on the above, aesthetics are not everything in design, but they are certainly what first captures a user's eye. This is why our feed is intentionally composed almost randomly, associating full images of objects with emotional zooms on portions of these that may tell a material, a workmanship, a detail, or a production process.
#4 answer
Your collection crosses geographical and typological boundaries. Have you ever discovered unexpected connections between objects far apart in time and space?
Absolutely yes. The form, materials, and technical solutions chase each other, contaminate each other, reinvent each other. Sometimes you recognize the same design gesture. Often you can see connecting threads between an object and its time, but other times it is the object itself that escapes its context, becoming a model, archetype, inspiration. Some projects cyclically return, reinterpreted with new materials or new technologies, precisely because they are capable of generating a charm that spans epochs.
#5 answer
Asform moves between archive and set design, Instagram and market: how do you balance cultural authenticity and economic sustainability? We don't want to compromise our research, but at the same time, a cultural project must be economically sustainable. That's why we look for hybrid forms: such as renting for photo shoots, design consultations, sourcing custom pieces for special clients, or selling some duplicate pieces. If we were asked to assess today, cultural authenticity must definitely take priority over economic sustainability, which is inherently variable over time and should be sought in the long term.
#6 answer
If you were to design a physical set-up, an "Asform interior," what would it be like? What objects, atmosphere, and narrative would inhabit it?
It would be a layered space. If we are talking about our Asform space, a project we have in the works, then we would like those who enter to feel like they are in a story rather than an exhibition: an immersive experience made of silences, discoveries, and small visual short circuits.
A sort of path that alternates even completely different objects and can put them in dialogue to stimulate the visitor's reflection. This operation is anything but simple but can generate unexpected reactions and reward as an aesthetic response and personal research.
When instead we are asked to set up an interior for a client, we let ourselves be guided by a close relationship that we try to establish with the client, trying to tune in with them, and turning them into an active part of the process. We work by delving into people's past, stirring up emotions and memories that can generate design intuitions and provide insights for selecting the right pieces to include in the interiors we propose.
#7 answer
We are almost at the end of the interview, in the editorial office we are all passionate about music and it is one of the artistic languages that we privilege, would you like to tell us three tracks that you are particularly attached to. Thank you.
With pleasure and thank you for the interview which, we must be honest, has allowed us at times to develop thoughts that were still embryonic on some topics.
Here are three tracks that often accompany us in our work and research:
Lucio Dalla - Disperato erotico stomp
Franco Battiato - La cura
Eddy Vedder - Society
