“Every epoch dreams the one to follow,” wrote Walter Benjamin, reflecting on modernity’s restless projection toward the future. Yet in the act of dreaming forward, every epoch also risks forgetting what came before. Progress, in this sense, is not only invention; it is often erasure. Contemporary design has largely embraced acceleration—innovation measured in novelty, value aligned with immediacy, aesthetics calibrated for the seamless and the new. It dreams in prototypes and renders, in surfaces that appear detached from time. But in this forward momentum, something essential is frequently lost: the stratification of place, the memory embedded in materials, the cultural depth that once anchored objects to lived experience.

COSEINCORSO, founded by Marzia Cerio and Marwann Frikach, takes a stand against this quiet amnesia. Rather than being part of the spectacle of endless reinvention, the practice engages through excavation and translation. The limited edition pieces that COSEINCORSO creates are derived from forgotten geographies, paused narratives, and residues of architectural and cultural memory. The past is not considered a source of stylistic inspiration but a terrain of latent significations that are ready to be reactivated. The practice of COSEINCORSO occurs in a deliberate temporal tension. The object is both excavated and speculative, as if it were an artifact excavated from a no-man’s land of time. This is not a temporal ambiguity for aesthetic effect but a structural one. By allowing archaeological memory and speculative imagination to coexist in the same object, COSEINCORSO subverts the linear narrative of progress and instead offers a layered understanding of time, where past and future coexist in the present.

At the nexus of craftsmanship, curation, and modern sensibilities, the studio recognizes design as a cultural gesture. Materials are considered as bearers of history: clay is a bearer of geological time, stone is a bearer of the process of extraction, textiles are a bearer of gestures repeated over time. By working very closely with artisans and through a deep engagement with the origins of materials, COSEINCORSO reinserts density into processes that are often reduced to two-dimensionality through industrial standardization. Their practice exists at a very specific point—between museum and home, between function and ritual. The objects have the meditative quality of artifacts, but they are intended to be incorporated into everyday life. This is both their power and their challenge: they evade both the commodified temporality of the throwaway and the sanctified untouchability of the museum piece. Instead, they offer a mode of presence that is quiet, rooted, and enduring.

In a cultural landscape oriented toward what comes next, COSEINCORSO asks a different question: what remains? Their practice suggests that design can be more than projection; it can be remembrance. To dream the future responsibly, it implies, we must first restore continuity with the stories, materials, and gestures that precede us.

Simone Lorusso: Walter Benjamin speaks of history as something that flashes up in moments of danger. Do you see your work as a response to a specific cultural “danger” in contemporary design?

COSEINCORSO: We often feel that we are living in a time dominated by standardization and surface-level aestheticization. Design risks becoming a closed system of images, styles, and trends, detached from critical thought and narrative depth. In that sense, our work is a response to the fading of discourse, critique, and storytelling within contemporary design culture. We try to move beyond pure stylistic production and oppose a purely market-driven “design of images” with a practice rooted in thinking, making, and reflecting. For us, making is not only about producing objects, but about constructing meaning, positioning, and questions.

SL: In a globalized market where objects are increasingly detached from origin, how do you negotiate the political implications of material sourcing and craft collaboration?

COSEINCORSO: We try, as much as possible, to work with people we know and with contexts that are close to us, both geographically and culturally. Our approach to materials is guided by a respect for territories: we prefer to work with what is available locally rather than relying on distant or abstract supply chains. This is not a rigid rule, but an ethical orientation. For us, sourcing and collaboration are political acts because they define relationships: with landscapes, with economies, with people. The object becomes a trace of these relationships rather than a neutral commodity.

SL: Your work moves between archaeology and speculation. Is this temporal ambiguity a way of resisting the ideology of progress that dominates modern design culture?

COSEINCORSO: We do not use the past to resist progress, but to understand ourselves and to elaborate a vision of the future. We are deeply interested in the historical relationship between humans and objects, and how this relationship has shaped the world: economically, politically, geographically. In this sense, archaeology is not nostalgia for us, but a tool to reframe possible futures. Looking at what has been, allows us to question what is taken for granted today and to imagine different trajectories for tomorrow.

SL: Design has long been complicit in systems of consumption and acceleration. Can limited-edition, hand-crafted objects truly operate outside those economic structures, or do they inevitably remain entangled within them?

COSEINCORSO: We are fully aware that there are already more objects in the world than what is strictly necessary. Our reflection does not aim to deny this reality, but to reintroduce meaning beyond pure utilitarian production. We try to articulate a discourse of poetics and necessity around objects: their intimate meaning, their narrative potential, their symbolic and artistic value. The question is not only what an object does, but what it represents and what kind of relationship it creates within a domestic space. In that sense, yes, it is inevitable to remain entangled with economic systems, but we try to trace a different path within them, slower, more intentional, and more reflective.

SL: You speak of “overlooked places.” How do you avoid turning marginal geographies into aesthetic capital? Where is the line between homage and appropriation?

COSEINCORSO: This is not our intention. On the contrary, we try to speak about stories that genuinely touch us and that belong to the territories in which they were born. For example, our ceramic collection was developed in Castelli, a small village in Abruzzo, the region where Marzia comes from. We chose to highlight a specific historical moment of Castelli, its period of maximum flourishing, and collaborated with local artisans by reworking ancient forms through a contemporary lens. For us, the project is rooted in personal and lived connections. The line between homage and appropriation is crossed when a territory becomes a mere aesthetic resource. We try to work from within relationships, not extract images from outside.

"We imagine contemporary individuals as people who still deeply need rituals."

SL: There is a strong ritualistic aura in your work. In largely secular contemporary societies, what role can ritual still play within domestic space?

COSEINCORSO: We imagine contemporary individuals as people who still deeply need rituals, sometimes inherited from the past, sometimes newly invented, in order to recentre themselves and reconnect with something almost spiritual that can protect them from the surrounding chaos. In this sense, the domestic space, often a space of solitude today, should function as a refuge. The gestures of our ancestors represent a heritage to be rediscovered.

For example, our first collection, Les Ames Simples, was born during the pandemic period, when we asked ourselves what cloistered nuns might have done in medieval times. This led to an exploration of Belgian beguinages and to a fictional narrative around the room of such a woman. Spirituality, but also collectivity and craftsmanship, were ways of surviving and giving meaning to isolation.

SL: Your objects seem to exist between museum artifact and everyday tool. Do you see your practice as challenging institutional hierarchies of value—what is considered art, design, craft, or heritage?

COSEINCORSO: We deliberately blur these hierarchies so that the public can focus on what the piece actually says, rather than on what it represents socially or institutionally.
We believe the world we are moving toward is made of overlaps and hybrid conditions. We want our objects to exist within this entanglement of categories, between art, design, craft, and heritage, without fixed borders. We also do not see our practice as limited to objects. We are interested in constructing coherent universes — visual, spatial and narrative — that can extend to exhibitions and even cinematic or scenographic contexts. We’d like to build worlds and narratives that can inhabit different scales and contexts.

SL: Craft is often romanticized as resistance to industrial production. How do you avoid nostalgia, and instead frame craftsmanship as a contemporary and even political act?

COSEINCORSO:  We have never seen craftsmanship as nostalgic, but as a concrete way of shaping the world of tomorrow. Using one’s own hands is a way of navigating reality, and ultimately of reclaiming a form of independence and emancipation. In this sense, the gesture itself becomes almost political. At the same time, as designers, we also collaborate with larger companies and engage with wider-scale production. But our starting point is always making, prototyping, and self-editing. We use craft as a method of thinking, not as a limit of scale. For us, this is also a practical system of autonomy: we think, we draw, we make.

"We do not understand sustainability only as the correct use of physical resources, but also as the necessity to protect immaterial heritage: gestures, rituals, songs, stories, everything that has shaped the world."

SL: Many contemporary designers prioritize sustainability in technical terms. Your work appears to approach sustainability through memory, slowness, and cultural continuity. Is sustainability also a question of narrative?

COSEINCORSO: Yes. We do not understand sustainability only as the correct use of physical resources, but also as the necessity to protect immaterial heritage: gestures, rituals, songs, stories, everything that has shaped the world. We sometimes work with reclaimed materials, as in the Fragma candle project, but our process always begins with photographs, images, and narratives that we want to preserve, both for ourselves and for others. Preservation and restoration are also forms of sustainability.

SL: If design shapes how we inhabit the world, what kind of subject—or citizen—do you imagine your objects are cultivating?

COSEINCORSO: We imagine a future individual who questions the status quo and existing norms, who is not afraid of the future. An introspective person who cultivates intelligence and research, almost like ancient scholars. For us, not knowing generates fear; curiosity generates openness.

This subject is optimistic. We think about people from the past who had time to read, write, and reflect, for whom solitude was not only consumption or escape.
We want to merge fragments of the past with new fictional narratives, almost science-fictional, in which humans enter a new moment of introspection, where space and objects become sources of inspiration, memory, and projection. Almost as if the domestic space turned into a movie.

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Words: Simone Lorusso