Across eight days during London Design Week, the Canadian designer and Bocci founder stages his intricate 113 sculpture as a result of ongoing experiments exploring the relationship between copper alloys and glass. During the performance, antiquities procured from flea markets and vintage stores will be melted and transformed into entirely new artifacts on a glass-blowing stage, allowing each material’s intrinsic properties to suggest its form. 

What results are shattered fragments of glass and the delicate beauty of wafer-thin, fragile sculptures in copper that resemble archaeological artifacts. “I’m interested in the transformations of matter, and the associated transformations of meaning, or lack of meaning,” Arbel says. “For example, you can take any arrangement of molecules—simple or complex, symbolic or meaningless—and the same raw material can be configured as a planet full of life, animals, microbes, plants, thinking humans.”