INVENTARIO NO. 18, FEBRUARY 2025

by Matteo Pirola

The Fly is a project-manifesto by a designer who has always maintained the courageous stance of one who stands on the threshold, but with the desire to imagine small solutions, minimal additions, to produce great differences.
Donata Parruccini is a discreet but concrete presence, who prefers to stand aloof but not hidden, of those who oblige, better said invite, by whispering, to change point of view. She is not interested in the ‘search for images of the future’ as much as in refocusing those of the present, because she wants her objects to be ‘so balanced as to attract the second glance, the one that is devoted to things worth observing’.
His design challenge is often confronted with anonymous objects, those of popular material culture, those of Bruno Munari’s “Compasso d’oro a ignoti”. Objects that are already perfect, to which he gives an apparently superfluous detail, which then turns out to be necessary.

Minute and common objects, but always significant for those who love every beat of creativity: a switch, a straw, a button or a drawing pin.
The Fly was born from an intuition, the kind that hardly needs explaining. Just as drawing pins settle on the walls, fixing flying documents, so do flies settle in the same places, stopping flying. It is a nice, smiling object that generates empathy and puts one in a good mood. It is literally a light project, in every sense of the word, the so-called “simple” kind where simplicity means the perfect order of a complex system.
Initially created as a self-production for an exhibition, The Fly was born in that special “workshop” called OPOS (where emerging young designers were appearing and interacting with the public and insiders at Milan Design Week) and was later produced by Alessi in 2001. Those were the days of the Millenium Bug, which with Donata Parrucchini brought The Fly. As Marco Romanelli wrote, “she designs only and only when she can add a small thing to the existing, a fragment of poetry, a trace of order, a tiny fly”.