designed for: ABOUT: Archivio
all images: Guido Artioli photography
Clori
blown-glass flower-pen
Clori is a flower-pen in blown glass, a fragile instrument that brings attention to the material conditions of writing.
Every script carries the memory of the matter that made it possible. Writing is never neutral—it is shaped by the tools, surfaces, and substances through which it takes form: the Latin alphabet, carved in stone, holds its sharpness and angles; Japanese calligraphy, drawn with brush and ink, unfolds in curves and fluid strokes. And so forth.
Even the simplest pen is an assemblage of extracted materials, each with its own origin, history, and agency. Clori foregrounds this entanglement, inviting a slower, more attentive gesture in which the hand does not impose, but responds. In doing so, it raises a broader question about the materiality of language itself, asking how it might change when written alongside other living forms. The kind of language which could emerge in proximity to flowers—one that is not imposed upon it, but shaped together, in care and respect.
The video extends this reflection into a visual essay, where the act of writing dissolves into a field of relations between ink, glass, water, and flowers.
The voice of the flowers ideally accompanies us into a different mode of listening—one that is closer to sensing than to decoding, suspending meaning between sound and image. In this space of relationality, flowers are not symbols but participants: they suggest that another language is possible, one rooted in proximity, care, and attention. A condition in which new stories might be written, together.