Only People and Things

In art history and archaeology – and perhaps too in other disciplines that deal with matter – there is a working distinction between “thing” and “object” whose purpose is to differentiate between two states of matter: thing refers to any physical entity that still circulates in the world, acquiring or accumulating meaning and purpose; object, on the other hand, refers to things that we have sacralized, or put in a museum, or in an archive and, by doing so, have become suspended in time. Objects no longer acquire new meanings, nor are they subject to transformations, symbolic or physical.

     Flight of the owl as a project is specifically concerned with the world of things, materials and tangibles that exist in our world in a state of becoming: lithium can become a battery, felt becoming a hat, a stone can become one thing in the hands of a stonemason and another in the band of a slingshot, yet another in the hand of a person skipping stones on water. A wall or a place can become sacred for a collective of people without changing in form, while a simple thing like a vase or a scarf can become symbolically significant for one or many people.

     As we approach it at flight of the owl, the objective of design, and in particular industrial design, is to find not only the aesthetic possibilities inherent in materials and in things, but also their inherent structural possibilities and probabilities. Thus our project is primarily a Research and Development platform, enabling the creativity and imagination of one or many individuals engaged in the process of design, a process that at the end issues things that deserve to exist in the world and thus become commercially available.