Riccardo Dalisi. The Chickpea Chair

“A little girl fashioned a tiny chair out of half a clothes peg and two small wooden fragments: a chair made to accommodate a chickpea. So then It brings to mind the fable of the princess and the pea. And so I felt like enduring the narrative. I took this minuscule piece chair on my travels, engaging every luminary I could meet: artists such as Endy Varol [sic], Beuys, Sottsass, Mendini, Savioli, and several others. . I invited these renowned figures to sketch the child’s chair” [Riccardo Dalisi]

Architect, designer and artist, in the early 1970s Riccardo Dalisi encouraged street children in the Rione Traiano, Naples, to design small furniture and architectural elements, using simple and 'design ultrapoverissimo’ materials such as wood, string and metal wires. "La sedia del cece" (The Chickpea Chair) is a work by a very small girl, Rosa, on whose interpretation various artists and intellectuals, including Andy Warhol, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Enzo Mari, drew. This volume - produced on the occasion of the exhibition "Riccardo Dalisi. Radicalmente”, curated by Gabriele Neri at the MAXXi in Rome - collects many of the drawings made by the artists prompted by Dalisi, and together with texts by architects and critics such as Stefano Boeri, Domitilla Dardi, Paolo Deganello, Fulvio Irace, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Purini and Angela Tecce, it becomes a manifesto of his "modus operandi".