Table of Contents Glass Collection by Fabrica Launched at Design Miami Basel.

Fabrica and the Zürich gallery Roehrs & Boetsch have teamed up to create Table of Contents, a new glass collection that debuted at the recent Design Miami Basel. In the designs that make up Table of Contents, glass is a medium for questioning human nature and perception. Under the creative lead of Sam Baron, head of design at Fabrica, an international team of 14 designers – coming from Australia, Ecuador, France, Germany India, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and UK – draw from their cultures, their skills and their desire to create pieces that tell stories, challenging the notion of objects and their presence in our environments. Within this collective assemblage, glass is the common denominator, lending a multi-dimensional transparency to the concept of containing, highlighting or protecting each narrative.

The designed object itself gains its importance primarily through the conceptual problem that it addresses, giving the pieces in question a special energy, as they explore new territories in unique and often unexpected ways.

As described, in Table of Contents the glass tells a story. Federica Simoni’s Fortune Cookies presents us with a conundrum: We want to read the message engraved on a metal “fortune” within the cookie, but in order to do it, we must smash the pristine sanded glass of the cookie itself. Angelo Semeraro’s Flaw presents a smooth glass cylinder containing an irregularly-curved cluster of glass tubes, the product of a digital “glitch” that is actually intentional, to challenge our ideas of just what the “state of the art” actually is. Nikita Bhate’s Drawing Sight is a contemporary take on a classic vase form, but with raised Braille text near the rim. Most of us can see the vase, but perhaps only those who cannot see can really understand it. Connection by Giorgio Gasco explores the notion of “connection” between two unrelated objects, but their unequal scales suggests that the larger is overwhelming the smaller. In these, and other pieces in the collection, nothing is quite what it seems, and we are left questioning our own assumptions about ourselves.

[Images courtesy of Fabrica.]