Martina Taranto

London

UK

Calatafimi Segesta

Italy

Artist-designer-innovator. Ethical reactions through fascinations characterize Martina Taranto’s design language. Through narratives, she proposes futures built on synergies.

Born and raised in Sicily, she’s grown with and being influenced by the intense presence of natural, folkloristic and mystical elements. A primordial tacit culture, made of symbols, subtexts and unspoken emotions, permeated and shaped Martina’s creative sensibility, who intends to investigate and envision a world built on tangible materiality and delicate symbolic messages.

Martina’s work wants to materialise something that is not purely functional, that has a hidden, latent purpose with a leverage on instinctive feelings, active at a second intellectual level of the user’s consciousness. Cultural and contextual awareness is what she’s interested in building. The approach to design is holistic, and emerges from a background that combines a range of disciplines, from energy engineering to product design. Martina’s work and training gravitate towards the necessity to find a compromise and a fluid dialogue between knowledge, humanity and the environment.

// Relativistic Objects

‘Relativistic Objects’ challenges contemporary behaviours and life habits related to the way we conceive and perceive the passing of time. These objects speak to anyone interested in redefining the way we approach and experience our lives, and emphasize the importance of physical interaction. This project translates into a practical exercise an activity our brain is gradually repressing because excessively relying on digital devices. Missing a sensorial experience of time has affected our ability to fix memories and consequently had an impact on the definition of our
self-consciousness. Artificial light allowed us to stretch our perception of time from a sum of finite instants into an unrealistic continuum. We became immortal, projected towards great life achievements, blind to the fugacity of our existence. We abandoned our circadian rhythm for a digital pace of life. Relativistic Objects are time visualisers. They don’t exist to measure time but for us to re-learn how to be aware of its passing by experiencing it through a visual representation of physical phenomena: gravity, the movement of celestial bodies, friction, phase transitions. Each piece is symbolically linked in its working mechanism with one of the four natural elements.