Maker Reporter #37 - Pasta Shootah

Hi everyone,

my name is Gianmaria Della Ratta and recently I started to be part of the fantastic community of Microlab.

I come from a small town in southern Italy, but I have been living here for 3 years now, where I graduated from the Master in Contextual Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

“If pasta is a symbol of being Italian, how can design be used to question its deep-rooted conventions?”

As a thesis project, I decided to focus on a topic very dear to my nation: pasta! Perhaps the biggest of the clichés! But yes, it is true, for us Italians, it is a sacred food that we eat every day.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti himself had called it an absurd Italian gastronomic religion that made the population lazy and heavy.

So, If pasta is a symbol of being Italian, how can design be used to question its deep-rooted conventions? How do new methodologies, 3d software and new materials connect to a national heritage in which food, industry, and politics have always had a complex relationship? And what future possibilities do they reveal?

Starting from these premises, I developed “Pasta Shootah”.

I took the stagnant methodology of industrial extrusion of pasta as a primary source from which to draw and translating it into the Digital world of 3d software. Here the centenary production process becomes surprising and interactive. Not bound to physical or even material forces. The extrusion is dictated by simulation that always gives different results in contrast with the immobility of the traditional production.

Thanks to the 3d software, pasta then becomes an investigative tool, where I changed its main characteristic of being food being able to compare it with the world of objects.

I took the most traditional shapes of pasta: Fusilli, Spaghetti, Maccheroni and Tagliatelle, and thanks to the new methodology I confronted them with element typical of design, to explore more in-depth technology and making in a cultural context like the Italian one and breaking with the tradition of seeing pasta just as food.

A project which is an attempt, an opportunity to create anew with the most traditional and oldest Italian production process, to arouse desire for future, for progress and innovation, to not be closed in our four walls of our cultural heritage.

I hope you like my project and that it will inspire you for all the amazing projects that you develop as creators and makers of this community every day. Above all, I hope you don’t get too hungry reading it!

Ciao