Amor vacui

The adjective ‘empty’, within the Western cultural context, is often negatively connoted; used as a synonym for ‘lacking’, ‘without’ content, meaning(less). We become expert meteorologists in order to fill those awkward silences that invade small talk. Filling the gaps becomes almost automatic, an involuntary reflex, a consequence of understanding them as containing entities. Unemployed, residual, vacant space is perceived as waste. Certainly, emptiness can be disorienting: without reference points, it is easy to get lost but it is just as easy to encounter something unexpected, surprising. When the explicit content is removed, the frames that enclosed it are highlighted. And here unfolds the value of emptiness, giving voice to aspects of life that were too shy to scream. Amor vacui aims to deconstruct the traditional notion of emptiness in order to re-evaluate it in relation to an approach to design that focuses on the interstitial aspects of objects. Appreciating what is not in the artefact itself, but rather around it: the excess of its physical boundaries. That charged halo which carries relationships, symbolism and character that would have been otherwise imperceptible.