FUORISALONE 2021
Top exhibitions spotted on this year’s Milan Design Week
Written by Joanne Marie Camello
After the cancellation of the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile and the Milan Design Week events in 2020, the world’s most awaited design fair filled with exhibitions, talks, performances and events has finally opened. Albeit delayed from its usual spring schedule because of the ongoing pandemic, Milan Design Week 2021 successfully hyped the global capital of fashion and design last September 4 to 10.
Coinciding with the Salone del Mobile, Fuorisalone is a simultaneous event that takes place across several districts in Milan, Italy. It’s no wonder why Milanese and tourists flock the city on the dates of this much-anticipated event; Fuorisalone has expanded its reach beyond the notions of fair and market, enough to pull people of varying interests together and celebrate design in prevalent ways possible.
Here are the top exhibitions and installations from various designers and artists spotted in the recently concluded Milan Design Week festivities.
So much for boring hollow exhibition halls, Alcova, an independent design platform by Space Caviar and Studio Vedèt, transformed an abandoned military hospital in the west of Milan into an eccentric art and design compound. Known to intentionally reactivate abandoned built structures, Alcova highlights a spectacular exhibition from more than 50 international designers, brands, galleries, cultural institutions and companies set in a 3,500 sqm indoor and outdoor historic urban park. The vast area allows abundant and separate spaces to digest art at ease and converse with designers freely.
With such a knack for adaptive reuse in architecture, Alcova emerged as a spectacular event in a former “Military zone, no entry” space that catered to the contemporary art cravings of the visitors. The outdoor lawns backdropped with deserted buildings are roused by a conceptual house installation made from cement fabric by French brutalist designer Marc Leschelier, an Aria di Cantiere installation made from discarded construction materials by Italian designer Duccio Maria Gambi, handcrafted wood works by Japanese studio Schemata Architects, and the vibrant letterpress prints by Japanese duo SPREAD.
Contemporary art and furniture displays are distributed inside the three re-adorned buildings: Casa delle Suore (House of Nuns), Lavanderia (Laundry), and Tempio (Temple). Participating artists and designers include Nilufar Gallery’s Brassless that celebrates the material potentiality of brass; Studio Ariane Shirvani’s Sweet Yellow features a series of vases carrying the chemical compound developed from a yellow floral signal; Lindsay Adelman Studio’s Paradise, a jewelry-like lighting installation that is surrounded by ceramic symbols decorated on the walls; Muse Gallery’s Rattan presents an interior built in rattan, wood and ceramic; and Visionnaire’s De Rerum Natura is a collection of lamps by Gupica in the shape of tropical plants. Other institutions and companies contributing to the exhibition are product designers of the Pro Helvetia exhibition organized by the Swiss Art Council. A group of students from HEAD – Genève, Geneva University of Art and Design with their unique approach on The Milk Bar, Berlin-based Llot Llov’s Trash2Treasure with their light installation made from reused face cream containers, and MUT Studio with their allegorical papier-mâché roots display.
Elle Décor in Palazzo Bovara
Staged at the 18th century-built Palazzo Bovara, Elle Décor Italia’s La Casa Fluida or Fluid Home was created by Elisa Ossino Studio with landscape design by Marco Bay and interactive installations by Kokoschka Revival. It unveils a house responsive to the demands of lifestyle mid and post-pandemic. Considering the new needs of inhabitants, Elle Décor promotes comfort, flexibility, immediacy of advanced technological interfaces, sustainability, and close fundamental connection with nature throughout its concept applied in a succession of 11 indoor and outdoor environments. With the Fluid Home’s hybrid function, its domestic dimension clearly depicts it as a “house of the future.”
Featuring nearly 100 events, 130 exhibitors, 140 showrooms with 15 new openings, the iconic district of Brera has proven its role in the commercial and cultural development of Milan, firmly standing as a benchmark of international design. Brera Design District promotes this year’s theme “Forms of Living,” focusing on exchange of rising domestic and lifestyle trends as a direct consequence of the virus outbreak and addressing the design professionals’ challenges for the future. From classic Italian design labels to luxury brands, Brera brags its furniture and design sectorfilled streets making it an international reference point for design culture.
LG’s built-in appliance brand Signature Kitchen Suite offers an immersive experience in their showroom as the South Korean brand transformed it into a garden filled with plant installations, a pop-up farm market and True to Food tastings – all while
exhibiting their standard cutting-edge technology on refrigeration, cooking and washing.
Italian brand CEDIT – Ceramiche d’Italia of Florim Group presents the capsule collection of Hotel Chimera comprising 80 unique pieces by Milan designer Elena Salmistraro who aims to reinvent ceramic products in the theme of illusion, imagination, dream and utopia.
iGuzzini illuminazione, a leading Italian brand in architectural lighting, brings an interactive The Light Experience to the visitors via a tour “Works Together” while sharing the brand’s innovative indoor and smart lighting systems in collaboration with renowned architects, engineers and lighting designers around the world.
Boffi and De Padova maintain its strong ties in creating excellence in bathrooms, beds, storage systems, kitchen solutions, and upholstered furniture and accessories. This year, they bring a new level of sophistication through their latest designs on interior design systems and furnishings.
Centered on contemporary art principles, Italian ceramic brand Mutina exhibits its latest Din collection by Konstantin Grcic in their new showroom in Brera. Called Casa Mutina, the showroom designed by Studio Urquiola displays how textures and materials harmonize in a functional living space. Mutina for Art, a project of the company in collaboration with various artists, currently displays Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s “Between the Lines” exhibition on a complementary ceramic display in Casa Mutina.
Iconic Italian wallpaper brand Londonart Wallpaper shows off its identity in an explosive combination of fashion, graphic and architectural elements expressed in its new collection The Daydreamer by GioPagani, displayed in its showroom located in the heart of Milan.
Visitors are brought closer to their luxury fashion desires as designer brands including Hermes, Dior and Missoni have
dominated scenes in Brera. Hermès commissioned Charlotte Macaux Perelman to offer a towering display of its latest home collection. The designer clearly understood the assignment and altered an indoor sports center to a colorful set of five patterned cubic “houses” on a bed of terracotta-colored sand. Dior Maison collaborated with 17 artists to showcase and reinterpret the house’s signature chair Louis XVI–style Medallion chair in Palazzo Citterio. Missoni highlights its signature colorful patterns in a lofty installation of overlapping chairs upholstered in five zig-zag iterations in its showroom. Additionally, the brand showcased more of its new outdoor collection on another Milan Design Week site, the Università degli Sudi di Milano.
Interni Creative Connections
Leading Italian interiors and contemporary design magazine Interni of Mondadori Group celebrates the 30th anniversary of Fuorisalone with another Design Week protagonist exhibitionevent called Creative Connections, set in three locations within central Milan: Università degli Sudi di Milano, Brera Botanical Garden and Via della Spiga 26. With its main intention to activate and multiply connections and relationships, Creative Connections focuses on building networks among designers and related professionals in the field along with their ideas and projects from varying places and cultures.
Revolving around three thematic ideas of care, sustainability, and mobility/speed, Interni supported by the City of Milan and co-produced by Audi and Eni offers almost 30 installations by local and international companies, institutions and start-ups curated to bring an imaginative cultural experimentation that sparks a rhetorical exchange between people and the environment.
Universita degli studi di Milano
A new creative horizon awaits visitors in the former monumental hospital building adapted as the headquarters of the Dean’s office of the University of Milan. The curated installations on display within the indoor hallways and outdoor courtyards are themed under recovery and regeneration, greater awareness and care for natural resources. Architectural projects include Kengo Kuma’s entwined bamboo and carbon fiber rings fused with advanced technology to produce music entitled Bamboo Ring: || Weaving a Symphony of Lightness and Form; MAD Architects’ Freedom created a large-scale seagull gazing the sky as a symbol of post-pandemic recovery; Peter Pichler Architecture’s Vertical Chalets prepared five small-scale models within the hospitality concept inspired by all-wood vernacular architecture; and Cino Zucchi Architetti’s Augmented Architecture amazed an optical illusive portal that drastically heightens the details of moldings and sculptures to invoke “explosion” of figure.
Other participating artists and institutions include New Academy of Fine Arts (NABA) – Claudio Larcher and Sara Ricciardi’s High Intensity Design Training, Davide Valoppi’s Il Design. Un Vaggio tra Italia e Spagna (Design. A Journey between Italy and Spain), Falso Autentico by Marco Nereo Rotelli, Uncracked by Stroop Design, Brasil – Design in Motion by José Roberto Moreira do Valle, and on the central courtyard, Stefano Giovannoni’s Survival.
Brera Botanical Garden
Natural Capital, an installation by Carlo Ratti Associati with the contribution of Italo Rota, presents a three-dimensional infographic installation disseminating issues on decarbonization and conservation of forests in a historic garden and open-air museum inside the famous Palazzo di Brera. Deemed as one of the largest data visualizations produced, the project shows floating bubbles extended in a 500 sqm garden depicting infographics on the production of oxygen of tree species and its key role in capturing carbon dioxide.
Audi City Lab – Via della Spiga 26
Set in an urban regeneration project of the historic Palazzo Pertusati, Audi’s latest exhibition entitled “Enlightening the Future” designed by Dutch studio Marcel Wanders boasts an enthralling experience on light, technology and innovation. Visitors are greeted with a sensory tunnel leading to the grand showcase of Audi A6 e-tron concept and Audi RS e-tron GT.
R/evolution SuperDesign Show
Superstudio Group introduces a new exhibition format in line with its usual Superdesign show, R/evolution, that boasts 12 exhibitions focusing on re-explored concepts tackling the demands of concreteness, innovation, sustainability, lightness, interconnection, and inclusivity in the post-pandemic world. As one of the core events within Tortona Design District, this year’s Superdesign show – Special Edition is set in a 10,000 sqm exhibition space called Superstudio Più fitting the best of Italian and international brands and production and latest lifestyle and home trends initiated by female designers, young people, famous architects and icons of the beginning of the third millennium.
Oblong Contemporary Art Gallery brings the exhibition “Surprise! Art tells” with the works of Italian artist Stefano Bombardieri that includes his prominent monumental resin and iron sculpture “Marta e l’Elefante” representing a suspended life-size elephant rope-tied and supported by a little girl. The Gallery curates a collective from Manu Alguerò, Mario Arlati, Pablo Atchugarry, Tiziana Lorenzelli, Flavio Lucchini, Antonio Signorini, and Gustavo Vélez.
Conceived by Giulio Cappellini, CULT&MUST 2000/2020 boasts the most evocative Italian design pieces that have made their mark throughout the last 20 years. The exhibition is participated by notable brands and institutions including ABTechLab, Alcantara, Alessi, Alfredo Wooden Bicycles, Arper, Baulificio Italiano, Bentley Home, Boffi | De Padova, Caimi, Cappellini, Cassina, Ceramica Flaminia, Cesana, Cinelli, Desalto, Flos, Geberit, Ginori
1735, Gobbetto, Icone Luce, IGV Group, Lamborghini, Living Divani, Istituto Marangoni Milano - The School of Design, Martinelli Luce, Nerosicilia Group, Or.nami, Poltrona Frau, Porro, Technogym, Trussardi Casa, Vanity Fair, Versace Home.
Proving a small mundane piece can reveal beauty in varied forms, 1000 Vases is a collection of unique pieces created by hundreds of international designers from 40 countries. As elaborated on in its dedicated book published by Skira, the exhibition speaks collaborative diversity through its harmonious scenography that ranges from tribal, minimal, pop, complicated, purist, sophisticated, sinuous, fun, geometric and irregular shapes and sizes.
Other exhibitions filled Superstudio Più including Materially’s Materials Village – Special Edition, a display of environmentfriendly and technologically advanced materials promoting dissemination of innovations on sustainability; Donne & Design, exposing women’s creativity value in design and architecture; Smart Home, interactive installations from Haier, Hoover and Candy on artificial intelligence and home automation; and Dream Cars, an enormous display of Automobili Lamborghini evoking the evolution of its design through progressive performance and innovation.
After the successful events, Salone del Mobile prepares anew for its anticipated 60th edition as it opens the city for another Milan Design Week spectacle on April 5-10, 2022. Who’s ready? Milan is waiting for you!