{"id":99908,"date":"2026-06-04T14:20:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T14:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/99908\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T14:20:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T14:20:23","slug":"a-look-inside-ccontinua-mamts-amsterdam-apartment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/99908\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look Inside Ccontinua + mamt\u2019s Amsterdam Apartment"},"content":{"rendered":"

To live in a space is to domesticate it, to make it a personal domus. It\u2019s no accident that this Latin word, at the root of so many others, refers to the private sphere. In the act of shaping our surroundings, we all become designers of our own domestic life. But what does that look like when design is also your profession? The answer lies inside the home of Chiara Caselli and Francesco Carrasso, also known as Ccontinua + mamt<\/a>, an Italian couple based in Amsterdam. <\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

Their apartment is filled with objects that together form an intimate gallery \u2014 a layering of personal collections and symbolic presences in which every element seems chosen by feeling rather than design. This depth is echoed in the work of photographer Francesco Marano (EllerStudio<\/a>), whose images, taken with the designers inside their own home, read the space as a narrative device rather than a simple container.<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

Ccontinua + mamt grew out of two practices that share an architectural grounding but speak in different languages: Chiara’s work in ceramics on one side, and on the other, Francesco’s graphic and decorative sensibility, shaped in part by his background in tattooing. The result is a body of work that moves between material and mark, between object and story, hovering in uneasy balance between the archaic and the contemporary. At the heart of this drive is a precise tension: transforming the domestic object into a narrative surface. Their first plates, from 2021 \u2014 hand-thrown and then incised as if into skin \u2014 open onto a dimension in which the everyday act of eating becomes an occasion to activate the imagination, to let stories, words, and visual fragments rise to the surface. The food disappears. The mark remains.<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

As the work develops, the scale grows \u2014 and with it, the complexity. Ceramics become sculptures, totems, fountains. At Edit Napoli<\/a> in 2022, the duo took home the prize with a project exploring materiality and its relationship with water. Dark clays and volcanic sands are combined, and water enters as an active, unstable presence \u2014 something that resists full control. In this shift, the work takes on an almost ritual dimension, and the objects are no longer simply things to be used, but to be moved through, observed, and listened to.<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

This creative logic is reflected in the home itself, where everything feels in flux. The domestic space, never quite finished, is continually rewritten by the objects that inhabit it \u2014 pieces chosen from their own production and that of others, alongside found objects, folk traditions, and multiple identities that drift slowly through the rooms. Amulets collected on travels, fragments of childhood, residual materials \u2014 shells, religious cards, fabrics, photographs \u2014 arrange themselves into small domestic compositions that form and dissolve according to shifting moods, temporary energies, and phases of work. The rooms flow into one another \u2014 the mezzanine descending via a discreet wooden staircase in typical Dutch fashion \u2014 while mirrors, tapestries, and vessels from exhibitions around the world sit alongside generous glazing that makes light the true protagonist, together with pieces brought in from both their studios.<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

Then the duo\u2019s vocabulary comes into sharper focus: an avowed emotional primitivism drawing on folklore, ancestral symbols, and iconographies that are simple on the surface yet richly layered beneath, combined with recognizable design pieces and a sensibility that\u2019s both light and shifting \u2014 fluid across disciplines, materials, and ideas. Mermaids, moons, serpents, incised words: elements that don\u2019t avoid meaning but embrace it, asking the viewer to complete the story. Alongside these, their own works in progress \u2014 prototypes, sketches, pieces still waiting to be completed \u2014 turn the home into a testing ground, a direct extension of the creative process, where the boundary between life and work simply doesn\u2019t exist. Here too, everything is continuity, and every element contributes to defining an atmosphere.<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

The narrative, at home, stays open. Visitors eat from their plates, drink from their cups, read the marks, move among objects that are never neutral. It\u2019s an experience that has less to do with the space itself and more with the possibility of recognizing within it a form of identity. And perhaps that\u2019s precisely the point: for Ccontinua + mamt, to inhabit is not to organize but to evoke. Not to design in order to establish order or impose hierarchy, but to activate a presence. Space here does not contain. It gives back.<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n

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Francesco Marano<\/p>\n