OBJEKTILE
28.03 – 21.05.2026

RITA ZURBRÜGG
PICCOLLI
NELE DECHMANN

Curated by
Damian Christinger

An Exhibition Essay on Metamorphosis in Art, Design, and Architecture

This essay gathers works that resist stable categorization. Instead of fixed objects, we encounter transitions, forms caught in the act of becoming. Borrowing from Bernard Cache, we might call them objectiles, objects conceived not as final forms but as continuous series of variations. “The objectile is an object considered as a continuous series of variations.”¹ What appears here as a sofa, a brick, a machine, or a vessel is less an endpoint than a momentary arrest in a longer process of transformation.

Cache reminds us that “what is important is no longer the object but the event of its variation.”² This shift from object to variation reframes art, design, and architecture as dynamic fields rather than static typologies. Metamorphosis is not an applied theme but an operational condition. Materials bend, repeat, erode, accumulate, and reorganize. Form becomes phase.

In an exhibition setting, metamorphosis unfolds as spatial atmosphere. Structures hover between surface and en into membranes, membranes drift into space. Light penetrates, scatters, and is absorbed. What once functioned as surface acquires depth and presence.The artefact does not impose form upon space; it grows into it.

In the architectural-sculptural practice of Nele Dechmann, the brick, that most basic construction unit, is released from its habitual obedience. Bricks lean, stack, tilt, get cut and recombine into configurations that reference informal architectures and provisional constructions. The brick retains its memory as building block, yet it is asked to perform differently. It becomes both structure and fragment, both wall and gesture. Through repetition and displacement, Dechmann reveals how even the most standardized element carries latent variability. Architecture begins not with monumentality but with reconfiguration.

A related yet materially distinct transformation appears in the ceramic practice of Rita Zurbrügg. Her planters, shaped by hand and guided by an architectural sense
of proportion, negotiate between organic curvature and constructed clarity. Clay is neither purely sculptural nor merely functional. It becomes a mediator between growth and containment. The vessel is not a passive enclosure but a participant in vegetal life. Soil, moisture, root systems, and evaporation collaborate with the ceramic body. In these works, architecture’s promise of shelter is reimagined at the scale of the plant. The planter becomes terrain, a small habitat attuned to cycles of emergence and decay.

The design duo Piccolli, formed by Rina Rolli and Noel Picco, both trained and practicing architects, extend this logic into the terrain of reuse. Working with found materials from construction sites, they create furniture and machines that preserve the scars and histories of their components. Offcuts, fragments, and discarded parts are not purified into seamless products but reassembled into new constellations. The result is neither nostalgic bricolage nor industrial polish. It is an acknow-ledgment that materials circulate through phases of extraction, use, abandonment, and reactivation. Their works embody an ecological metamorphosis in which waste becomes structure
and detritus becomes instrument.

Across these practices, perception itself becomes unstable. As Juhani Pallasmaa reminds us, architecture is grounded in bodily encounter: “The door handle is the handshake of the building.”³ This observation shifts attention from visual spectacle to tactile engagement. The porous ceramics of Zurbrügg, the rough brick assemblages of Dechmann, and the textures of Piccolli invite the hand as much as the eye. Metamorphosis is registered in the body. Surface temperature, weight, resistance, and balance become part of the aesthetic field.

Material, in this exhibition, is not inert. Jane Bennett describes this vitality as thing power: “By thing-power I mean the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”⁴ The works assembled here demonstrate that materials are not passive recipients of human intention. Clay cracks. Brick absorbs moisture. Metal oxidizes. These transformations are not failures but continuations.

Bennett further cautions that “The image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”⁵ To recognize metamorphosis is therefore to adopt an ethic. It is to accept that art, design, and architecture participate in broader ecologies of change. The object is not sovereign. It is contingent, relational, exposed to time.

Objectiles do not promise permanence. They offer variation. They suggest that every artifact is a temporary constellation of forces, a brief stabilization within longer material and energetic flows. Clay becomes habitat. Brick becomes sculpture. Offcuts become design. In each case, the work resists closure. It invites us to dwell not in the certainty of fixed form but in the hum of continual becoming.

1. Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories,
trans. Anne Boyman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 89.
2. Ibid., 94.
3. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture
and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley, 2005), 64.
4. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.
5. Ibid., 122.

EXHIBITION VIEWS

WORKS

Rita Zurbrügg
Untitled (Planter 3), 2026
Stoneware, engobe, glazed
H 52 x W 47 x D 35 cm
Unique
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Rita Zurbrügg
Untitled (Zigzag), 2026
Earthenware, unglazed
H 19 x W 46 x D 15 cm
(Single element)
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Rita Zurbrügg
Untitled (Planter 1), 2026
Stoneware, engobe, glazed
H 49 x W 40 x D 42 cm
Unique
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Rita Zurbrügg
Nazar Battu (Bike Helmet rack), 2026
Stoneware, engobe, glazed, wool
H 23 (70) x W 10 x D 24 cm
Unique
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Rita Zurbrügg
Untitled (Cactus), 2026
Stoneware, engobe, glazed
H 33 x W 31 x D 28 cm
Unique
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Rita Zurbrügg
Untitled (Planter 1), 2026
Stoneware, engobe, glazed
H 49 x W 40 x D 42 cm
Unique
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Piccolli
Stan, 2026
Aluminium acoustic panels, steel hinges
H 199 x W 189 x D 3.5 cm
Unique
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Piccolli
Till I Collab, 2025
Chrome-plated steel tube, clamps, pressure regulator
with hose, end caps; CO₂ cylinder (13 L, ALIGAL™ 2, Air Liquide),
Aarke Carbonator 3
H 129.5 x W 39 x L 39 cm
Open Edition
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Piccolli
Teletube, 2025
Stainless steel sheet, ratchet straps, stainless steel
tension and compression rods
H 67 x W 110 x L 271 cm
Unique
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