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# Camilla Garelli and the Life of Objects
- URL: https://abagofstories.com/camilla-garelli-and-the-life-of-objects/
- Published: 2026-08-02T12:57:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-02T15:18:35.000Z
- Description: Through Tecla, ceramic designer and cultural planner Camilla Garelli looks beyond the finished object, following the materials, gestures, relationships, and meanings that allow a thing to become part of a life.
- Author: Claudio Maria Lerario
- Tags: Objects That Travel, Hands & Materials, Friends of AFAR, Italy

At [Zoma Museum](https://abagofstories.com/zomamuseum-where-the-ground-becomes-the-work/) in Addis Ababa, Camilla Garelli briefly stepped into a role that was not her usual one.

She stood in front of the camera for an AFAR shoot. Around her was a place shaped by the meeting of architecture, earth, art, cultivation, and patient human work. The camera looked at Camilla. 

Yet much of her own practice begins by reversing that direction: she looks at the objects, materials, gestures, and spaces surrounding us. Not only at their appearance, but at the lives they contain.

Camilla is a longtime friend of AFAR. Her participation in the shoot is one visible expression of that friendship, but perhaps not the most significant one. The deeper connection lies in a shared way of thinking about objects. 

A bag, a cup, a vessel, or a piece of furniture never begins in a shop. Before reaching us, it has already passed through landscapes, knowledge, labor, choices, mistakes, and hands. And its story does not end when it is purchased.

Photos for an AFAR campaign

## A City Still Under Construction

Camilla Garelli is an Italian designer and cultural planner based in Turin, where she founded [Tecla](https://fromtecla.com/?ref=abagofstories.com), a ceramics, design, and research studio named after one of the cities imagined by Italo Calvino in *Invisible Cities*:

> Tecla is a city perpetually under construction. Its inhabitants raise scaffolding around other scaffolding, support beams with further beams, and continue working until sunset. When a visitor asks to see the plan they are following, they point to the night sky. “Here is the plan,” they say.

The choice of this name reveals something essential. Tecla is not built around the idea of a definitive collection, an established style, or a single discipline. It is a working structure: a place in which making, observation, research, travel, photography, and collaboration can continue to alter one another.

Camilla trained in industrial design and later in visual cultures and curatorial practices. Her work has taken her through Italy, Africa, and South America, where she participated in social and territorial development projects involving art, design, and architecture. In 2019, she began working with ceramics and became absorbed not only by the material, but by what its processes could teach her.

This distinction matters. Ceramics was not simply another technique to master. It became a way of paying attention.

Tecla grew from that encounter. Today it describes itself as a studio of ceramics, design, and research, exploring the relationship between people, materials, and cultures of making through objects. 

Its projects bring together material experimentation, design, and the observation of everyday practices. The studio produces objects, but it also remains a construction site.

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In her Turin studio, clay becomes both material and method: something to shape, but also something from which to learn.

## What Clay Teaches

Design is often presented through its conclusions: the finished shape, the polished image, the object carefully arranged against a neutral background. The process disappears. Time is removed. The hands that made the thing retreat beyond the edge of the frame.

Clay resists this simplification. It records pressure. It responds to water, air, waiting, and heat. It can hold the intention of the person shaping it, but it also imposes its own conditions. A project must pass through the behavior of the material before it can become an object.

For Camilla, ceramics is the starting point of a broader investigation. Through it, she observes the gestures, knowledge, and practices that give form to everyday life. A vessel is therefore never only a vessel. It is also evidence of a relationship: between a hand and a material, a maker and a technique, a body and a domestic space.

Tecla’s objects are conceived as functional or decorative pieces, but also as elements capable of connecting people, gestures, and places: things intended to be used and lived with over time.

This changes the meaning of beauty. Beauty is no longer a surface added at the end of a process. It emerges from proportion, use, material knowledge, and the coherence between an object and the life around it.

A cup meets the hand before it meets the eye. A bowl occupies a table, receives food, waits inside a cupboard, and returns each day. A vase changes when it holds a branch. An object acquires meaning through repetition, proximity, and use.

The designer does not control all of this. She creates the conditions for it to happen.

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## After the Object Is Finished

An object leaving the studio appears complete. In another sense, its life has only just begun.

It enters a room. Someone chooses where to place it. It becomes associated with a meal, a person, a season, or a house. Its surface may change. It can be moved, given away, packed into a box, inherited, forgotten, found again. The object designed by one person gradually gathers the lives of others.

This is one of the most compelling aspects of Tecla. Alongside production, the studio documents stories connected to craftsmanship and local knowledge. Travel, photography, encounters, and collaborations become methods for observing how things are made, used, and passed on and how they participate in the formation of relationships and identities.

To study the life of objects is also to study the systems around them. It means asking where materials originate, whose knowledge is recognized, how skills travel between generations, and why certain forms survive while others disappear. It means noticing the difference between an object made to remain and one designed to be rapidly replaced. It also means resisting the idea that tradition is fixed, anonymous, or untouched by the present.

Practices of making are always changing. Artisans experiment. Materials become scarce or acquire new meanings. Techniques travel, meet other techniques, and adapt to different needs. Continuity is not the absence of change. Often, it is the ability to change without losing memory.

Tecla therefore looks beyond the borders of ceramics. Through commissioned work, installations, site-specific interventions, and collaborations with craftspeople, designers, businesses, and cultural institutions, the studio connects design processes with particular spaces, contexts, and communities.

The objective is not to collect influences and turn them into style. At its best, collaboration complicates authorship. It asks people to listen before designing and to recognize that knowledge may already exist in a place, a practice, or another person’s hands.

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## Objects Are Never Silent

We often describe objects as though they were passive. We say that they fill a room, decorate a table, carry our belongings, or serve a function.

But objects also organize behavior. They invite particular gestures. They establish distances between bodies. They reveal what a society chooses to preserve, display, repair, discard, or pass on. They can carry affection, authority, ritual, memory, and status. Even the most ordinary object belongs to a larger arrangement of relationships.

This is why Tecla’s work cannot be understood only through photographs of its finished pieces, however carefully those pieces may be made. The photographs are an entrance. The real subject lies beneath them: the long conversation between matter and human life.

One of Tecla’s research projects, *Argilla Madre*, makes this dimension explicit by exploring clay in relation to symbols, ritual, listening, and transformation. In the project, the act of shaping material becomes a way to consider memory, attention, and the meanings attached to making.

This does not require objects to become solemn. They remain things to be touched, placed on tables, held, washed, moved, and used. Their intellectual and cultural value does not separate them from daily life. It returns them to it.

The most meaningful object may not be the rarest or the most expensive. It may be the one whose presence we have stopped noticing because it has become inseparable from our routines.

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## What We Choose to Keep

The friendship between Camilla and AFAR begins with people, but it is strengthened by this shared attention to things.

AFAR makes bags: objects created to move, carry, protect, and accompany. Tecla works primarily through ceramics: objects more often associated with interiors, tables, and the repeated gestures of domestic life. One travels with the body. The other waits for its return.

Yet both raise similar questions. What do we ask an object to carry? How should it age? What knowledge lies behind its construction? What happens when we choose to repair it rather than replace it? How can design acknowledge the people and places from which its materials and techniques emerge?

These questions have become more urgent in a culture crowded with objects but increasingly detached from their origins. We are encouraged to know the price of a thing, its dimensions, its color, and how quickly it can reach us. We are told much less about the conditions that made it possible or about the relationship we might build with it once it arrives.

Camilla’s work proposes a slower form of attention. It begins with clay, but it does not stop there. Tecla is also becoming a space for documentation, stories, images, journeys, and exchanges among different practices. Its research is meant to remain open, capable of producing new projects and connections among people, places, materials, and objects.

Like Calvino’s city, its plan may never be fully separated from the work itself. There will always be another structure to raise, another material to understand, another person whose knowledge changes the direction of the project. This incompleteness is not a weakness. It is a way of remaining attentive.

An object, too, is never entirely finished when it leaves the hands of its maker. Someone else will begin to live with it. Time will add what design could not predict.

And perhaps this is when an object becomes more than a thing: when it enters a life, accepts its marks, and begins to remember.

[Visit Tecla Website](https://fromtecla.com/?ref=abagofstories.com)