What Materials Remember
What Materials Remember
Curation · 12 May · By Valeria Viollaz · VV Interior Home · Lucerne, Switzerland
Valeria Viollaz is the founder of VV Interior Home — a studio dedicated to the curation of collectible design, antique stone and art from Lucerne, Switzerland. Her work has been featured in Annabelle Magazine Switzerland, Elle Decoration, The Life Magazine London and Designeers Black Book.
By Valeria Viollaz · VV Interior Home · Lucerne, Switzerland
I did not plan this.
I never plan the ones that matter.
The table arrived first. Then the book. Then the ring. And somewhere between standing still in my coat and placing a gold leaf on cold marble, I understood something I had been trying to articulate for a very long time.
That some objects do not wait to be found. They find each other. And when they do, the room gets quieter — and more true.
Beuys believed that every material holds memory. That the work of the artist — of anyone who makes, who chooses, who arranges — is not to create from nothing, but to listen to what things already carry.
I have believed this my entire life. I simply did not always know how to say it.
This is my attempt to say it. Through a marble table from Milan. A gold ring from Copenhagen. An antique lace from a forgotten trunk in France. And a signed catalogue that has traveled with me for years — from hand to hand, from room to room — because some conversations never end.
Joseph Beuys: The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland · Modern Art Oxford · Signed first edition · Oxford, 1974 · Private collection, Valeria Viollaz · Dress: Muta Lux · Ring: Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen · Seiler Juwelier Basel
On the book I was holding.
Before the ring. Before the table. There is always a book.
The one I am holding in this photograph is not a coffee table object. It is the catalogue from the 1974 exhibition The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland — Joseph Beuys, Modern Art Oxford. And it is signed. His handwriting, his hand, Oxford, 1974.
I have carried this book for years — not as a possession, but as a conversation. Beuys believed that every material holds memory. That the role of the artist is not to create from nothing but to listen to what things already carry. That making is a form of thinking, not a form of decoration.
I believe the same thing. I have always believed it, without knowing for a long time that someone had already said it more clearly than I ever could.
When I hold this book beside a marble table, beside a gold ring shaped like a leaf, beside a textile that has survived a century — I am not styling a room. I am continuing an argument that started long before me. And that, I hope, will continue long after.
Joseph Beuys · The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland · Modern Art Oxford · 1974 · Willy Guhl · Paul Klee · Ring: Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen · Seiler Juwelier Basel · Dress: Muta Lux · Travertine table · VV Interior Home · Lucerne
On what the hands hold.
This is part of my morning. Before the day begins — before decisions, before emails, before anything that asks something of me — there is this. A book. A table. The light as it arrives.
I found it without looking. I did not open it, did not read it, did not need to. I simply knew — the way you sometimes know, before any explanation, that something belongs to you. It has lived in my collection ever since. On my desk, always. I open it every time I need to think more clearly, or feel less alone in the way I see things. My connection to Beuys is very personal. His theory is extraordinary — and he explains what I have always felt far better than I ever could.
The book open in my hands is The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland. I return to it often — not to read it from the beginning, but to open it at any page and find something I had not seen before. That is the nature of his drawings. They do not explain. They think. Every line is a question still open, still moving, still unresolved. A mind working in public, without apology, without conclusion.
Beside it on the table: Willy Guhl. Klee. Art books whose names matter — and whose museums I always visit. The quiet geometry of things chosen for what they are, not for how they look.
I think here. I read here. I place things beside each other here until something shifts — until the room gets quieter, and more true.
This is where curation begins. Not in a showroom. Not in front of a screen. Here, with both hands, with the morning light, with the patience to wait until objects tell you what they need beside them.
On the textile and time.
The dress is Muta Lux. But to call it a dress is to say too little.
What I am wearing was conceived in their atelier with a level of care that is almost impossible to describe. Muta Lux works with a single, non-negotiable conviction: that every antique textile must be preserved in its entirety. No cutting. No fragmenting. No adapting the fabric to the garment — instead, adapting the garment to the fabric, so that every thread, every weave, every inch of what has survived remains exactly as it was found.
The lace in this piece comes from a trunk found in France — over a hundred years old, belonging to a great family whose name has been lost but whose refinement has not. And it is not a detail. It is the soul of the entire garment. The most emblematic embroidery runs along the full perimeter of the dress and frames both cuffs — a border of extraordinary delicacy that took months to integrate without disturbing a single thread of the original.
When Rabea photographed my hands, she was photographing a hundred years of someone else's life, worn at my wrists. That is what Muta Lux gives you. Not a garment. A continuity.
Leaves Ring medium pavé · Charlotte Lynggaard · Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen· In collaboration with Seiler Juwelier Basel · Mario Bellini · Colonnato II · Cassina · 1970s · VV Interior Home collection
On the ring. On the table. On the moment everything aligned.
The table arrived without warning. I had dreamed of it for a long time — not as something to find, but as something I knew would find me. And when it did, I recognised it immediately. That is how it always works with the objects that matter.
Mario Bellini's Colonnato II is monumental. There is no other word. Designed for Cassina in the 1970s and inspired by the classical columns of Roman antiquity — the most enduring structural invention in the history of Western civilization — it is a piece that commands the room with a force that is rare. Not aggressive. Inevitable. The kind of presence that does not ask for attention but receives it completely, the moment it enters a space.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a full retrospective to Bellini's work in 1987 — at that point already holding 25 of his pieces in its permanent collection. The Triennale di Milano honoured him with the Gold Medal for Italian Architecture. And the Compasso d'Oro — the most rigorous design prize in the world — awarded him eight times, a record that remains unmatched. These are not decorative honours. They are the acknowledgment of a body of work that changed the way the world understands the relationship between architecture, material and the domestic interior.
And yet. Within that force, within that architectural weight, there is something unexpectedly tender. A beauty that does not shout. That holds. That endures.
I have always been moved by that contradiction. The monumental and the sublime, coexisting in the same form.
And then the ring arrived beside it.
I have admired Ole Lynggaard since the moment I discovered the Elephant — the piece that introduced me to the founder, to his story, to the world he built from a conviction that nature is the most generous designer there is. That encounter changed something in the way I look at jewellery. From that moment, I understood that a piece could carry a philosophy — not just a form.
I have owned some of their pieces for years. Chosen slowly, one at a time, the way you choose things you intend to keep forever. But this one — the Leaves Ring by Ole Lynggaard — I had always adored from a distance. Something so delicate it seems impossible. A leaf in gold, hand-worked in Copenhagen, 48 diamonds set one by one. The kind of object that makes you wonder how something so fragile can feel so inevitable.
They spoke to each other.
The monumentality of Bellini and the delicacy of Ole Lynggaard. The stone and the gold. The force and the tenderness. Not contrast. Symphony. Two objects that had never met, from two different worlds, discovering in that moment that they had always been part of the same conversation.
These pieces came through Seiler Juwelier in Basel — one of Switzerland's most refined jewellers, carrying an extensive collection of Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen. A place that does not sell jewellery. It presents it — with the knowledge, the time, and the understanding that a piece like this is not bought in a moment, but chosen over a lifetime.
Rabea Hüppi was there that morning. She always knows when to be still and when to move — when to wait for the light and when to follow it. The sun entered through the window at exactly the right angle, casting a shadow across the marble that was as precise and as inevitable as the ring itself. She saw it before anyone did. Without her lens, this moment would have existed only once, in a room in Lucerne, and then disappeared.
Because of her, it endures.
I follow the thread.
— Valeria Viollaz
PROJECT CREDITS
Curation & Text · Valeria Viollaz · VV Interior Home · Lucerne, Switzerland · Photography · Rabea Hüppi · rabeahueppi-fotografie.com · Jewellery · Leaves Ring medium pavé · Charlotte Lynggaard · Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen · In collaboration with Seiler Juwelier Basel · seiler-juwelier.ch · Textile · Muta Lux · mutalux.com · Object · Mario Bellini · Colonnato II · Cassina · 1970s · VV Interior Home collection · vvinteriorhome.com · Reference · Joseph Beuys · The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland · Modern Art Oxford · 1974 · Signed first edition · Private collection, Valeria Viollaz
VV Interior Home collaborates with brands that share a commitment to craft, material integrity and timeless design. For editorial and curation partnerships: marketing@vvinteriorhome.com