Speaker in acidified iron and ash
Saturnia
2025
Saturnia originates from a simple question: what happens when sound stops being directed at someone and begins to inhabit space? ArmoniusLab's answer is not merely technical — it is philosophical. Rather than directing music towards the listener, the speaker releases it into the environment, allowing it to flow, rebound and expand.
The result is a less invasive and more personal mode of listening, where every note blends with the surrounding atmosphere and the room itself becomes an instrument. This gesture reflects the spirit of ArmoniusLab: a laboratory that believes in harmony between form and function, technology and craftsmanship. The ash wood body rests on a sinuous iron structure.
The pedestal is not merely a support: it is a formal element that holds the speaker at an upward angle, a visible invitation for sound to rise and disperse. The iron is treated with an acid finish that reveals its inner character. Here, acid acts like a brush, opening the surface and allowing textures and depth to emerge that no coating could reproduce. Each piece is unique and unrepeatable. The same surface can accommodate customised patinas and controlled oxidations, allowing Saturnia to adapt to different architectural and interior contexts.
Border — not as a barrier that separates, but as a living space of relationship, a threshold where ideas, materials and languages meet. It is within this intermediate territory that Saturnia naturally finds its place. The first boundary the project addresses is that between object and environment.
A conventional speaker directs sound towards someone, defining an inside and an outside of listening. Saturnia dissolves this distinction. Sound is not directed; it is released. The listener is no longer the recipient of music, but an integral part of it.
There is also the boundary between disciplines. Saturnia is neither an audio product with refined aesthetics nor a piece of furniture that happens to produce sound. It is both, with equal dignity. Handcrafted wood and worked iron, audio technology and domestic sculpture coexist without hierarchy.
A further boundary exists within the material itself. The acid-treated iron inhabits the threshold between control and chance, between the intention of the maker and the unpredictable reaction of the acid. Saturnia does not inhabit the edges of space: it inhabits boundaries.
Those between sound and silence, matter and air, craftsmanship and technology. And it is precisely in its ability to make the threshold fertile that its connection to this year's theme fully reveals itself.
To learn a craft, or to learn to see the world through it?
Trained in Verona, Brescia and at the Politecnico di Milano, Elia Dusi contributed to the development of ToMove, an electric mobility start-up, before founding ArmoniusLab in 2025 together with another young designer from Verona — a place where creative energy takes shape.
At the centre of the practice is materiality: wood, metal and polymers, explored through techniques ranging from local craftsmanship to 3D printing. Not to emphasize a contrast, but because true innovation assimilates the past without erasing it.
Each object carries within it both the memory of the hand and the precision of algorithms.
Research is never an end in itself. Every project begins with a concrete question, where aesthetics and function are reconciled until they become indistinguishable.
Beneath handcrafted surfaces lives a silent technology — electronics, smart systems— that surprises not through its appearance, but through what it is capable of doing.
Limited edition. Technique, care and uniqueness. A method more than a label.