Skateboards usually need to be light and have wheels to serve their purpose. But if you take off the wheels and polish them up, they can be turned into art.
Alessio Scalabrini is an Italian designer who decided to do something unimaginable with skateboards—turn them into static objects. His skateboards are made out of marble and don’t have wheels. They are meant to serve as purely decoration pieces, forever still and robbed out of their lightness and speed.
“By removing its wheels and replacing its flimsy deck with the firm everlasting nature of marble creates a paradox: a fluid form in motion, yet static and solid,” the artist explains.
According to Scalabrini, the “(skate)board” series is an aesthetic exercise. It aims to answer the question of how to reinterpret “the most iconic object of street culture using Italian craftsmanship?“ And it does it in an impressive way.
These skateboards are hand sculpted using the locally-sourced marble. They come in three colors—Guatemala Green, Nero Marquina, and Rosso Francia—with each color having seven skateboards, which have been signed and numbered by Scalabrini.
Most of Scalabrini’s skateboards have finished their exhibition tours and found their home in private collections. Luckily, we can still admire them thanks to the magic of social media.
