Amy Butt

made in Montecalvario

Responding to the aberrant systems of manufacture scattered over the kitchen tables of Napoli. Reacting with radical optimism to the apparently exploitative nature of informal outwork. Reconsidering the inherent craft of the artisanal object and the bespoke process. Re-siting the displaced domestic to celebrate and facilitate this intersection with the industrial.

This project celebrates the aberrant condition of outworkers in Napoli, women working in isolation connected only by networks of favours and family. Their kitchen tables are transformed and fragile domestic activities are forcibly displaced by fabrication.

A gap site within the Spanish Quarter provides space for communal interaction. A scaled up kitchen table becomes the locus of activity over which transient activity flows, while equipment is lowered from above. Each suspended frame provides for a specific task, an inventory of the overlapping domestic and industrial, serving and defining the space below. The facade acts as a screen revealing and representing internal activities, retracting after work, allowing the street to reclaim the space.

The simultaneity of suspended objects, the fleeting spatial transformations, and the blank surface onto which multitudinous activities can be transposed combine to provide the necessarily intricate support system for these women’s complex lives.