A useful object, if you need one. A beautiful one, regardless.
My grandmother kept a room like no other room. I would go in as a child and something in me would slow down — the light was older there, the air held still. Her things had been touched by hands before mine, worn into a kind of silence. I didn't have words for it then. I'm not sure I do now.
Everyone has a door like that somewhere. A drawer, a shelf, an object that asked nothing and said everything. And the nerve it took, once, to reach for it.
objects of sofia begins there.
The door
Rome still keeps one; the Porta Alchemica, the last gate left standing from a 17th-century villa, its stone cut with symbols that were never meant to be easy. We borrowed its name for a few of our pieces. A small signal: that a thing can be a threshold, and that the ordinary often isn't.
The name
Sofia. From the Greek for wisdom; but not the kind that comes from age. The kind a child already has, before anyone teaches them otherwise. Both live in the name. Neither cancels the other out.
The object
Everything starts with the fan — one of the few shapes time never got around to changing. Passed hand to hand, century to century. Ours are still folded by Spanish families who learned it the way it's always been learned: slowly, and from someone older. We take a form this old and give it back its everyday use — a colour, a mark, something worth carrying.
Because a door in a grandmother's room should still be able to open something, wherever you find it.
