Aetna begins with a question about time: what objects look like when form is not imposed but extracted. Each piece starts as a strict architectural archetype, a chair, a table, a stool, then is carved, chipped, pierced and eroded by hand until it oscillates between construction and ruin.
The material is a dense composite of reclaimed sand, crushed construction rubble, mineral residues and fly ash, worked while still malleable and left to harden with every fracture the process has produced. It reads as geological, porous and ancient, while remaining entirely fabricated. Objects that appear excavated rather than built, weathered rather than finished.
Where Ustio works through the violence of fire, Aetna works through patient subtraction.
