Interview with Tiago Curioni: flying on the green Benetti Moss for ‘Life Collection’

Benetti Home, customization of product and service for interior design

BENETTI MOSS is the name of the zero-maintenance vertical garden for interiors made with a 100% natural and stabilized lichen, easy to manage, starting from installation, which is very simple and can be foreseen in the project step or even later in already furnished and ‘lived in’ environments. Featuring highest versatility of application, the garden can be placed on the walls and even on the ceiling. This product offers advantages from the point of view of cleaning, thanks to the absence of electrostatic charge that does not attract dust, ensuring stability and durability over time, as well as being unwelcome to insects. This panel features good sound-absorbing qualities and fire-retardant properties certified in class A by the rigorous American fireproof tests.

The scenographic presence of ‘green’ in the interiors is not only motivated by an aesthetic factor linked to trends, but also by the positive effects of relaxation and well-being generated by the sight and contact with the ‘green’ element at home, in the office, in commercial spaces, in food and hospitality premises. BENETTI HOME, a young and dynamic Italian company, has developed a product with unique characteristics, both from a technical point of view and for the fantastic aesthetic impact, which effectively solves the critical issues that make the use of indoor ‘green’ uneasy. Since the ‘moss’ idea was born about 15 years ago, it makes use of cladonia stellaris, a moss collected in the woods of Northern Europe, which is now widely used in interior design. BENETTI HOME was born in 2016, but the company can boast thirty years of professional career of the owners in the field of interior design, as well as on a well-known brand on the marketplace. The company is a lean and dynamic business based in Novara, where marketing and commercial management are centralized.

As a Brazilian artist and designer who lives and works in Portugal, Tiago Curioni was immediately conquered by the naturalness, easy application and absence of maintenance of MOSS, the indoor green from the Italian company BenettiHOME. His opinion is twofold: as a designer who collaborates with a furniture manufacturer in Portugal and as a landscape architect boasting five years of experience as a Landascaping Architecture designer. This first collaboration – which the artist hopes could be the beginning of a long journey together with Benetti – was conceived by Tiago in his role as creator of unique pieces of furniture, a concept that lies between highest craftsmanship and artistic creation.

“My work – says Tiago – approaches two different markets: one very commercial and the other more oriented towards search for innovation and creativity. I believe that the collection we are talking about certainly belongs to this second line of work, being aimed at the target of collectors, design galleries and small batch production.

The Life Collection line consists of unique pieces, where the presence of MOSS is an integral part of the dazzling and attractive conception of the Coffee Table and the Roof Lamp, the two pieces composing the collection presented at the 2017 edition of MADE, the International Biennale of Market, Art and Design which takes place in Sao Paulo with the aim of bringing the art market, artistic craftsmanship and design closer together, in a typically Brazilian concept of furniture based unique pieces, creativity and highest formal quality.

“I worked on Life Collection to reach a result that could satisfy me – continues Tiago. For years, one of the themes that put pressure on my creativity was the Coffee Table. During the research to give meaning and suggestions to this piece of furniture, I met MOSS by Benetti in 2016 and it was love at first sight, because my experience as a landscaping architect made me appreciate the naturalness of the product, which combines exceptional stability, a beautiful colour palette, absolute workability and lack of maintenance, with its own internal balance, which makes any external intervention more harmful than useless.”

In Tiago’s vision, also fully shared by Benetti’s production philosophy, the Coffee Table covered with MOSS is an example of how green, together with the transparencies of an aquarium, can be a factor of serenity and well-being. The same sensations can be perceived in the Roof Lamp made of sheet steel, covered with live lichen. With products such as MOSS, Benetti’s function is that of stimulating the market and of offering the designer new ideas and possibilities for creative growth. “With this project – concludes Tiago – I felt the desire to convey, just looking at it, the aesthetic pleasure of green made up of 100% stabilized lichens used by Benetti for MOSS and to fly over a green forest, imagining the view of a wood from an airplane window. We are working with Benetti to continue our collaboration and I hope that new projects will gradually and increasingly express the potential of MOSS.”

Benetti Home