GrassCutter - Martin Sati

Definition of “designer” for this project:
The one who creates textures to cushion the blows caused by falls.

A fall is understood as failure.
Failure isn’t that we fall, but that we know we are falling continuously.

So we build “cushioning fields.” To build these fields the designer needs tools, and through them we construct our reality. These tools act like screens that filter everything around us—and everything that affects us.

GrassCutter is a study of homogenization in design, understood as an effect of use: what tools allow us to do and, over time, what they teach us to desire—and to discard.

We start from a familiar experience: when a tool solves a task well, we tend to repeat its procedure. Repetition makes the gesture comfortable and, almost without noticing, fixes an aesthetic, a rhythm, and a methodology. The result is useful and efficient. We build what we desire.

The sculpture uses whatever clears the way. It adjusts, trims, designs. It carries out the work while leaving out small decisions: slight flower sprouts, weeds, inflections of rhythm. They’re not always missed, but when they’re systematically absent the landscape becomes easy to use—flat, humanly traversable.

GrassCutter is a sculpture made of printed paper in layers, mounted on wooden rods.