Murano glass lamp designer and founder of the Aventurina Design brand, Silvia Finiels has recently created a new atelier and showroom space in Murano, overlooking the beautiful northern lagoon, where she spends her days creating, assembling, and finding inspiration. We visited her to explore her creative process and her connection to Venice and its glassmaking tradition. Studio Visit is a series by Inside Venice that tells the stories of workshops, ateliers, and artist studios through the unique stories of the creatives working in the city.
Interview & photos by Valeria Necchio
VN: I’m curious to know whether you remember the first time you came to Venice and what you thought or felt?
SF: I first came with a friend for the Biennale, it was around 1985. What I remember most, as we walked and walked, is that I immediately felt a great sense of freedom. I returned many years later because I met my husband, who is a native Venetian. We met by chance. He’s the one who made me fall in love with Venice. At the time, I was in Milan for work, and shortly after I thought that I no longer liked living there – I found the city difficult, cold. Although, in retrospect, I definitely changed my mind, Milan is a hub for creativity, for design, and thus also for my work. Anyway, I decided to leave, to return to Venice and settle for a bit. It’s now been 35 years.
VN: You have an artistic background. What was your training and what led you to do what you do today in lighting design?
SF: In France, I studied drawing and styling, a tailoring school, let’s say. Then for three years, I attended a school in Lyon, specialized in the tradition of silk. Finally, I attended a fabric printing school, a subject I loved much more than drawing and sewing in truth – I am not made for calculating centimetres, I found it very boring. Even in the work I do now with my lamps, if I think about it, I never start with the drawing, I start directly with the material: it is the material that inspires me. Anyway, from Lyon, I returned to Paris to do internships in fashion. I worked with great designers like Mugler, they were all there at the time, all bringing new ideas, a new vision of fashion and prêt-à-porter. But I felt, deep inside, that I needed to leave. After some travel and a wonderful experience at the Viareggio Carnival, I felt that Italy was calling me. And so I came.
VN: How did you transition from fabric to glass?
SF: The transition to glass happened thanks to my husband, who was an artist in every way, full of curiosity. When I met him, he had a shop and sold 19th-century glass beads, fantastic murrine. A year later, he discovered and acquired a large quantity of wonderful 20th-century beads – a collection that emerged seemingly from nowhere. So I started making necklaces, unique pieces made from these incredible beads. From there, we continued working more and more with antique beads and became collectors. For me, it was an opportunity to touch firsthand the varied world of glass, filigree, calcedonie, murrine, gold leaf, all the 19th and 20th-century techniques related to beads, which are an incredible part of Venetian culture that has spread worldwide. For ten years, I did this, and I barely realised the privilege I had in being part of this microcosm and the treasure I worked with every day.
After that, we decided to change, to sell the bead collection and become antique dealers. In the ‘90s, there was an antique dealer boom in Italy, extraordinary things were found and there was a lot of market. We traveled around Italy on a Chevrolet van, buying and selling things, doing markets and flea markets. It takes a lot of energy. When we got tired, we sold the van and got a shop in San Polo selling glass. Giorgio had this ability to find great gems, to talk to people and get them to open the doors to magical places – warehouses full of amazing glass pieces, treasures they didn’t even know they had. In one of these, we also found some pieces by Sottsass, who was a great innovator, he revolutionised the history of Murano glass with his creativity, with his use of colour. And here too I saw that there were some pieces that were neither vases nor glasses, they were parts. And that’s where the idea of making lamps came to me. In time, I developed a personal technique: I mount, assemble, and glue pieces together to create something different every time. At the beginning, a very nice man named Franco helped me. For work, he was sent around the world to dismantle Murano glass chandeliers. He assembled my first lamps, and I will always remember his joy, his kindness. Thanks to him, I learned how to do it and became independent. I have been making lamps for over 15 years now and over time I have developed a very personal style.
VN: How would you define your style?
SF: At the beginning, I had beautiful pieces but didn’t have a style; I just put together similar elements. Now, having been buying glass for a long time, and thus having a good base to draw from in terms of eras, techniques, colours, and thickness, I choose the elements based on a palette, on “families”, and following this method I assemble elements that are coherent and in dialogue with each other but also contrasting. Through contrast, they enhance each other. In short, it’s a style of composition, matching, and assembly. I say style even though in reality, there are many styles: my research rests on a many designers, furnaces, artists. I take a piece here, a piece there, cut them, polish them, modify them, rework them and prepare them for a new purpose, and put them together, making something of my own, finding my volumes and harmonies in a very intuitive way. And in the end, there must be something that holds everything together and makes it coherent because people recognise me and recognise my work.
“he most boring thing for me is to replicate, reproduce the same things. I like to create. In repetition, I had started to lose sight of the beauty of glass, I saw it as a cold material. Sottsass opened my eyes to its creative potential and gave me the motivation to diversify.”
V.N: What inspires you in your creative process?
S.F: I mentioned it before, but Sottsass inspires me a lot because he is the personification of joy. I have read his books and find that he was a light-hearted personality, a true creative: he mixed things, had great freedom in creation. He inspires me because in him I saw the possibility of playing with glass – with this material that sometimes can seem extremely heavy, in the sense of being weighed down by tradition, folded in on itself, or bent to market logic. The most boring thing for me is to replicate, reproduce the same things. I like to create. In repetition, I had started to lose sight of the beauty of glass, I saw it as a cold material. Sottsass opened my eyes to its creative potential and gave me the motivation to diversify.
V.N: Your lamps almost seem like sculptures.
S.F: Yes, I believe glass should be elevated to sculpture because it is an incredible material, forged by fire, and it is extremely difficult to find the right colour…For this reason, I also like to highlight all the glass colours that exist, especially those that no longer do – for example, there is a new European regulation that rightly prohibits the use of arsenic and lead; but this means that there are colours that no longer exist, because opalescent glass was made with arsenic, and a certain type of red was made with lead. And I have the privilege of working with things like this, with rare pieces, and so it’s important for me to give them their due value.
V.N: I was recently talking to Elena and Margherita Micheluzzi, and they were telling me about the colour formulas of the furnace they work with. And we were talking about the fact that the recipe is a literary form – perhaps the only literary form – that translates into action, and that contains within it the variable of human error.
S.F: Sometimes it’s a wonderful thing because error leads to discovery. Sometimes it’s not; sometimes everything explodes. It’s a job, it’s a continuous surprise, but you need recipes and the experience of these people, who do what they do so seamlessly but in reality have invested an incredible amount of energy, work, and material to get where they are. And all this should not be wasted. This is the treasure of Murano, and it is made of small booklets with colour recipes scribbled on their pages.
V.N: How do you think Murano is doing? How do you see it in the near future?
S.F: Fortunately, at a certain point, a different seed arrived in Murano: Berengo. Berengo arrived like a germ of something new and from there grew a tree that provided shade and fruit. Berengo knew how to utilise without exploiting, working beautifully and intelligently with great artists interested in practicing with glass and bringing their knowledge, their name, their interests on the island. This has done a lot of good for Murano. There are other innovators, too, the first being Paolo Venini, who came with entrepreneurial ideas from Milan and knew how to enhance and consequently sell this craft, how to seek collaborations with brilliant, intelligent, refined artists who had a knowledge of harmony, of material, of research, and a great curiosity. How do I see Murano today? I see that Murano will save itself because it has been able to find its letters of nobility, its quality. The problem is schools. Today you have to go to Seattle to learn how to become a glass master and take lessons with Lino Tagliapietra. There is great potential but our local talents will eventually take their skills abroad if they don’t feel valued here. So, Murano must return to valuing this art and craft from an educational point of view because without skilled glassmakers who can also do research, we pack our bags and leave. We are done.
V.N: What were, besides your husband, the encounters or moments that made you see Venice with different eyes?
S.F: My husband, who was twenty years older than me, passed on to me the enthusiasm for beautiful things. He was an artist and an enthusiast, and he knew how to communicate beauty. He introduced me to many people who, like him, loved Venice passionately. And he made me love this deeply human way of life –– a life that is very connected to people, to encounters, to talking and crossing paths on the street. Venice has become a maternal figure for me. It has given me everything, it has given me a reason, a sense to live, it has given me a new life. I was reborn in Venice. Perhaps the pain I feel when I see Venice so overrun with people is linked to this feeling of being dispossessed of one’s home, to not being able to carry on these deeply human rituals that are so dear to me. Another great illumination for me was the realisation that Venice is not just a city but a breathing being immersed in a natural green lung, in a lagoon that is wile and, in many ways, very spiritual. An environment that offers wonderful aesthetic experiences, between sunsets, bird flights, clear skies. Yes, Venice is spirituality. This city has a soul, and you feel it viscerally.
V.N: I really feel what you mean. To me, it’s an aesthetic experience that reveals itself in those quiet moments and secluded corners. It thrives on solitude.
S.F: Aesthetics are part of having faith. And faith surpasses us. And Venice, even Venice surpasses us. Venice is made of layers of things, houses, churches, people, stories. And then it has this water that passes, that crosses it, that reflects it and gives a sensation of euphoria, of joy in enjoying such full yet so simple beauty. It’s a joy that heals. A caress.
