Born of Fire and Glass: AINA KARI’s Venetian Craft Language
people • makers
Founded by designer Marina Cighir, AINA KARI is a studio rooted near Venice, where centuries-old artisanal traditions intersect with a quietly poetic contemporary language. After years working with internationally renowned brands in Italy and abroad, Marina returned to Treviso to establish a practice guided by purpose, community, and material integrity. Drawing on Venetian glassmaking, marble carving, and hand-forged metal, AINA KARI creates sculptural objects that explore fragility and strength, tension and balance. Today, her work can be discovered internationally through Artemest and experienced in person at Isola Space in Dubai. In this conversation, Marina reflects on slow design, the value of local craftsmanship, and the way objects can carry memory, energy, and meaning beyond their physical form.
Words: designeers
JANUARY 2026
WEBSITE: aina-kari.com
INSTAGRAM: @ainakari_official
DESIGNEERS
The ‘Aina Kari’ name carries a poetic and historic meaning. What does this ancient Persian mirror-mosaic tradition represent to you, and how did it become the starting point of your brand identity?
Marina Cighir
While searching for a name that could connect where I live with what inspires me, I discovered the story of Aina Kari and felt an immediate connection. This ancient Persian architectural technique uses finely cut mirror mosaics to transform space through light, reflection, and fragmentation.
Its materials originate in fifteenth-century Venice, where glassmakers perfected small mirrors that travelled east along caravan routes. Many were fractured during the journey, and Persian artisans transformed these fragments into luminous architectural compositions. That idea of fragility becoming strength resonated deeply with me.
Aina Kari became the perfect symbol of my work: a dialogue between cultures, a tribute to Venetian glass craftsmanship, and a reminder that beauty often emerges through transformation.
DESIGNEERS
Your designs sit between fragility and strength, tradition and reinvention. What personal tension fuels this aesthetic?
Marina Cighir
My work lives between opposites because that same tension exists within me. We are all made of contrasts. At times, we are vulnerable, then resilient, only to become fragile again. We continuously reinvent ourselves.
Some experiences harden us, making us solid like marble. Others leave us light and transparent, like Venetian glass. This fluctuation is not a weakness. It is what makes us human. Emotions, memories, and experiences fracture and reassemble us, creating something new each time.
This is why I identify so deeply with Aina Kari. Like its mirrored fragments, we are shaped by what breaks us and by how we choose to recompose ourselves. Identity, beauty, and meaning are formed within that tension.
Burgundy Stravedamento
The Hug of Artisans
DESIGNEERS
What is the earliest memory of beauty that shaped you as a designer?
Marina Cighir
I do not recall a specific moment when I recognised myself as a designer. I have always felt more like a free creative, unconditioned by market demands, free to experiment, to create, and to fail.
My earliest memory of beauty is tied to learning to trust my intuition rather than rules. The only boundaries I ever imposed on myself were a sense of aesthetics and respect for common sense.
A particularly defining period was Venice in 2020. With the city emptied of crowds, I was finally able to observe it closely. I noticed details that had always been there but were once drowned out by movement and noise: the soft sound of a gondola touching the canal, the precise gestures of a boatman tying knots, the murmur of pigeons inhabiting a silent city.
Those small, almost invisible moments revealed an intimate and deeply human Venice. What I once overlooked, I chose to preserve. That way of seeing became the foundation of my work.
DESIGNEERS
Venice plays a silent but essential role in your aesthetic. Which qualities of the territory continue to influence your work?
Marina Cighir
Venice constantly offers inspiration through observation. The mirrored surface of the lagoon, where the peaks of the Dolomites appear to float above the water, inspired the Stravedamento collection in glass and joint marble. The name comes from a Venetian dialect word describing this optical illusion.
Equally evocative were the gestures of the boatmen. The quiet precision of ropes and knots, performed daily with instinctive mastery, became the foundation of the Venetian Knots candleholders. These functional maritime movements were translated into sculptural forms.
Language, landscape, and ritual are distilled into objects. Each piece carries a fragment of lived experience transformed into design.
DESIGNEERS
Which material has challenged you the most when designing?
Marina Cighir
Blown glass has been the greatest challenge. We do not use moulds for our decorative pieces, so every object is inherently unique, with its own variations and unpredictability.
The challenge intensifies when glass must interact with harder materials such as marble or brass. Each responds differently to tension, weight, and time, requiring constant sensitivity during production. It is within this complexity that our objects find their authenticity.
Venetian Knots
Foggy Venice Capsule
Lagoon Tears
“While Murano glass is widely celebrated, I believe hand blacksmithing deserves the same recognition. Too often these skills remain invisible. Communicating their value is essential if we want to preserve them”
Marina Cighir, FOUNDER OF AINA KARI
DESIGNEERS
What non-design influence, a song, a book, a childhood memory, continues to shape your creative language?
Marina Cighir
Some influences come from childhood: the warm glow of oil lamps in my grandparents’ home, or the worlds I travelled through in Jules Verne’s books, which I read endlessly.
Others come from slower moments, such as silent Sundays in the countryside where time feels suspended. Ritual also plays an important role. Orthodox icons, with their colours, placement, and symbolism, are deeply engraved in my memory. Standing through long Saturday liturgies as a child shaped my understanding of stillness, repetition, and meaning.
DESIGNEERS
What place in Treviso or Venice feels like a reset button for you?
Marina Cighir
Living within the Sile Regional Park feels like a privilege. The river flows from Treviso toward the Venice Lagoon, surrounded by greenery and calm.
Swans glide alongside canoes, trattorias appear along the riverbanks, and a simple glass of Prosecco becomes a reminder of balance and gratitude. Translating this sense of harmony into my work feels essential.
DESIGNEERS
Your pieces feel like quiet conversations between past and present. What do you hope someone feels when they first hold one of your objects?
Marina Cighir
I hope the first feeling is awareness. I want people to sense that what they are holding is not simply an object, but the result of time, material, and intention.
I hope it sparks curiosity, a desire to understand where it comes from and the territory that shaped it. Not the familiar image of Venice, but its hidden corners, gestures, and landscapes revealed only through patience and attention.
Black Hug of Artisans
Bundle Black Venetian Knots
DESIGNEERS
One artisan technique you wish more people appreciated.
Marina Cighir
While Murano glass is widely celebrated, I believe hand blacksmithing deserves the same recognition. Too often these skills remain invisible.
Communicating their value is essential if we want to preserve them. Craft survives only when it is understood and desired. When materials are shaped by human hands and techniques are passed down rather than replaced, objects gain meaning, and so do the territories around them.
I feel fortunate to work alongside a small family of blacksmiths near my studio, carrying both history and future forward.
DESIGNEERS
What experience do you hope someone has when they hold an Aina Kari object?
Marina Cighir
I hope they feel a quiet certainty, the sense of having recognised something different, authentic, and precious before the rest.
A moment of understanding without noise. That is the experience I wish to offer.
Amber Crafts
