A work in progress · Leonardo Pecoraro
Sowing beauty, keeping memory.
Tessera Mundi makes small works of art to carry with you or to pass on: traces of a landscape we all share.
Tessera Mundi begins with micro-works made one at a time, meant to be kept: each one finds a person and a place, and from that moment its story carries on without me. The Atlas gathers those presences and connects places, visions and people.
- 1Choose a tessera and take it into your keeping.
- 2It arrives in its case, with the seal on the back.
- 3Scan the seal, tell me where it lives, and your city or village joins the Atlas.
It is not only a purchase: it is a way of entering the project. Read the Pact of Keeping
The scale
It sits in the palm
of your hand
Six centimetres by six, two and a half thick. Small enough to hold, dense enough that you never quite finish looking.
Light changes the work as it moves: gold and silver come alight and go out again depending on where you stand.
Manifesto
Tessera Mundi is a mosaic six centimetres across. A seed of beauty.
Every tessera is a single piece, signed on the back, and it does not exist twice.
Whoever receives one keeps it, or gives it away: either way the beauty moves, and finds another pair of eyes.
Together, the tesserae that are kept form the Atlas: the great collective mosaic of the world.
Beauty does not announce itself. It is sown.
Those who keep them
The words of
the people who said yes
L'ho incontrata nell'atelier di Leo e mi ha incantata. Per ora è a casa, sul mio piccolo tavolo dove disegno.
I met her in Leo's studio and she enchanted me. For now she is at home, on the little table where I draw.
Wie die Aare, die ich jeden Morgen vor meinem Haus beobachte. Nun habe ich meinen kleinen Silberfluss auch bei mir zuhause! Er erhellt meine Tage und schenkt mir Gelassenheit. Danke, Leonardo, dass du Schönheit säst!
Like the Aare, which I watch every morning in front of my house. Now I have my own little silver river indoors as well: it brightens my days and gives me calm. Thank you, Leonardo, for sowing beauty.
Quand j'ai vu cette tesselle, je suis tombée amoureuse de la multitude de couleurs, comme si c'était une fête ! Le titre est très bien trouvé. Elle m'a transmis de la joie.
When I saw this tessera I fell in love with the multitude of colours, as if it were a celebration. The title is perfectly chosen. It passed its joy on to me.
The words are theirs, in the language they wrote them in. All the stories on the Atlas
The object
Two and a half centimetres
of thickness
The thickness is not a technical detail: it is part of the work. The tesserae stand out from the cement support one by one, and seen edge-on you can read the gesture — the mortar, the rim, the hand.
The materials are all salvaged. The glass and the enamels are left over from other work, the stones I pick up on the road to the studio, and even the adhesive comes from a tiler — whatever is left at the bottom of the bucket at the end of a job. I buy nothing new to make a tessera. I do not say it as a virtue: it is how I work, and I like the thought that something thrown away ends up where someone looks at it every day. And there it stays — a tessera is not thrown out. At most it changes hands.
What arrives
A small black case
with a window
Every tessera travels in a black case with a window. Inside there is more than the work:
- The work, unique, signed on the back.
- The QR seal: you scan it, you tell me where the tessera lives, and your city or village joins the Atlas.
The Atlas
The collective mosaic of the world
Every tessera that finds a home joins a map: the city or village of the person keeping it, the date, and their own words. Places only, never addresses.
The map grows with every tessera that finds a home.
Cartography © OpenStreetMap
How it stands up
Each keeping
makes the next ones
The contribution is 85 CHF, shipping included anywhere in the world. Inside it are the materials — glass, enamel, gold leaf, silver, stones picked up along the road — the case, the seal, the postage. And the hours.
What is left goes back into the studio: it becomes the glass and the stone of the tesserae still to come. Whoever keeps one holds the workshop open for the next.
Beauty does not announce itself.
It is sown.
On the other side there is no anonymous catalogue, but a living project made of works, places and relationships.
If you would like to step into it, you can start with the tessera that feels most yours.
Explore the Atlas Go to the Shop
A question first? Write to me — on the other side there is a person, not a shop.
From the studio
Know when
a new one is born
Leave your address and I will write when there is a new tessera.