A little over a year ago, on my way to see Morandi at Palazzo Reale, I found myself circling around the Napoleonic centerpiece. Something about it eluded me—something rising from its very material yet not immediately visible.

The mystery did not lie in its role as a celebratory object, nor in being the model for a mad urbanistic vision of a utopian, neoclassical square full of Latinisms and imperial rhetoric. What unsettled me was the realization that it was not a miniature at all, but the square itself. The actual physical place where the fate of the outside world was decided. Not the public square, then, but rather that table adorned with decorative bronze objects was the true political machine from which transformations radiated to shape the world.

The same bronze which, on reflection, inscribes two primary properties within its very fibers: its physical reality as a conductor of heat, and its historic role as the chosen incarnation of heroes. I began to wonder how such table-monuments might translate today, and from that thought these forms emerged. Optimized to dissipate heat, they are germinated from the object-based intuitions of Sottsass, Colombo, and Mangiarotti’s ashtrays, and Mari’s centerpieces.

I sought to condense into these objects the two driving forces I had observed: the inner, physical one that excites atoms, makes them vibrate and collide; and the outer one, which radiates from the object to stir stomachs, agitate bodies, ignite the world outside. Both transform this matter of the world from a single, dense, private core—the hot center around which the decision-making power of authority crystallizes. I wanted this magical transition to demand a sacrifice in the form of smoke. A minimal yet loaded gesture: a decision-making ritual that becomes an offering to the altar of authority.