Simple machines

These are the windmills, but we didn’t only build five or six. I rebuilt them many times to see how many kinds of materials I could use, there were many options depending on what you had available. I have to admit that part of it also depended on what your local traditions were: you learnt from the older boys and what you learnt is what you built. (Ettore Guatelli)

Teaspoons, logs, branches, bottle tops, corks, skewers, walnuts, cans, canes, bars, nails, jar lids, chestnuts, feathers, wooden washers, sticks and twigs, metal muselets. The materials that were available became sources of play and practice.

The windmill boat.

In Ettore Guatelli Museum’s Playroom there is the “windmill boat”, a symbol of all the toys kids built for themselves and their younger siblings. Building toys was in itself a game, and an act of creativity.

There exists a relationship, or rather a dialogue between Ettore Guatelli’s museum and his crafted windmills: namely, the quest to find forms of “showing” that are capable of “capturing” the interest, forms that become mirrors for those objects and materials we often ignore. Not dissimilarly, machines display the possibilities of recycling, the quietness of playing and creating, the “most with what little one has”, and the enjoyment of inventing and “making it work”.

We say machines because they possess the simple movement of a wheel, of transforming the possible energy of the wind or water into movement. They are machines built for rotation, not for a particular purpose but for the sole pleasure of movement, of play, able to put wonder and fantasy into motion . They are windmills playfully built to “show what they could be built of”. (Ettore Guatelli)

We can see a sort of synthesis in these fantastical machines, a kind of “plastic” writing that speaks of the strong bond between dexterity and invention, between recycling and creativity. It’s a synthesis that Guatelli was researching and practiced in his teaching job and his career as a museographer and collector. 

Ettore Guatelli thought of his museum as a place where he could show the physicality of imagination, typical of matter and objects. He imagined a museum that could display a multitude of forms inspired by our everyday lives in the form of common items. Guatelli’s “fantastical machines” are a form of the usefulness of playful experimentation, a form of mechanics which is “good to think with”.