Can a carabiner become a jewel?

BOA is an objects holder born from the hundreds of meanings on the theme of jewellery and focused mainly on its relationship with the functional dimension. A piece of jewellery is functional when it embellishes gestures such as telling the time, closing a shirt, stopping hair, fabric or supporting a bodice. Human beings have transformed most of the artefacts that have had to do with the body into aesthetic material. The object from which my research started is the functional jewel par excellence: the châtelaine. Châtelaine, from the French “housekeeper”, refers to a holder worn as a brooch or hung on the belt, both by men and women in eighteenth-century England. Hence, various tools were suspended and adaptable to any needs through different chains. These needs could include sewing, sending letters, attending social events and coping with daily life. The thesis project consists of a reinterpretation of this historic and fascinating accessory, questioning what objects are indispensable for contemporary human beings. The development of the idea comes from an intuition: the carabiner is nothing more than a modern châtelaine. Indeed, carabiners of different shapes and crafts are used to carry keys, cards or small containers. The BOA objects holder, which is the product of the thesis, is a rethinking of the carabiner from an aesthetic, technical and usage point of view to introduce it in a dimension of ornament, redefining it as a functional jewel.