Milan Diaries: Day One

This week the Disegno team is on the ground in Milan for the Salone del Mobile. Over the coming days we’ll be sharing our reflections from the festival and picking out some of the installations, exhibitions and launches that stood out. The first dispatch follows below.

A light gravity

Product launches are the bread and butter of the Salone, but one of the great joys of the week is seeing the scenography employed by brands to inject a little razzle dazzle into their offerings. This year, full marks to Hermès on that front, with the French Maison returning to the cavernous La Pelota venue in the city’s Brera neighbourhood with Looking for Lightness, an installation celebrating its new home collection. Designed by the collection’s creative directors Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, the display filled the darkened Pelota with four vast structures: timber constructions covered with translucent coloured paper that glowed from within. The structures were nominally inspired by water towers, but executed in shades of ginger, rose and lemon, they seemed more like candies, with their internal lighting creating a strangely reverential quality within the space. Inside the structures (whose constituent materials will be reused following Salone), Hermès delivered exactly what you would expect: a selection of consummately crafted textiles, porcelain, and furniture pieces, displayed atop stacks of rough, artisanal paper. There were standout works (new versions of Tomás Alonso’s Coulisse lamps, Jasper Morison’s Équilibre d’Hermès wooden chair, and textiles that drew on patchwork and quilting in their construction), but the success of Looking for Lightness was the manner in which its constituent parts worked together to emphasise the craft traditions within the brand’s work. And thanks to Macaux Perelman and Fabry's installation design, they had the perfect temple in which to set out their wares.

Looking for Lightness: La Pelota, via Palermo 10

Cats, cats and cats

If Hermès went heavy on craft and tasteful detailing, others flung themselves headfirst into the world of kitsch and kawaii. Atelier Biagetti, the studio of Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari, opened Pet Therapy, a show devoted to “giant, docile, lunar cats” that promised to “turn the clocks back to make us kids again”. The show’s concept (developed from a drawing by Biagetti and Baldassari) may have been paper thin, but to criticise it as such would be to rather miss the point: in place of deep conceptual thought or immaculate craft techniques, the studio had filled their space with giant painted, polystyrene sculptures of cats (designed to be lounged on in as cat-like a fashion as possible), accompanied by a landscape formed from leather beach balls (exercise balls given a reskin) and lamps created in the style of palm trees, but executed in wrappings of Moncler-esque quilted textiles. It all made very little sense, but was none the worse for it. Pet Therapy offers a moment of pleasant silliness amidst the hubbub of Milan: like coming home to a lovely hug from a little cat (albeit a little cat who is now a polystyrene titan).

Pet Therapy: Piazza Arcole 4

Baas is marketing

During the 2014 Salone del Mobile, the designer Maarten Baas staged Baas is in Town, an exhibition of his work following a five-year absence from the design week. This year, Baas has reversed the trick, putting a series of posters up around the city that read “Baas is Out of Town” and provide a QR code to downtownpalmela.com. On this website, Baas explains that he is not attending the 2022 Salone because he has instead bought 13 hectares of land in Palmela, Portugal, and will be spending his time there instead. The website vaguely suggests that the property could be transformed into "a restaurant, a B&B, spaces for artists in residence, workshops, tiny houses, greenhouses, etc,” but Baas seems to be keeping his options open. “I would say ‘For more information, just email us’ but actually, what I’ve just told you, that’s all the information I have,” the designer writes. "There is no plan, nor a planning. We let it grow, just like nature.” A kind of Salone anti-presentation, then (which, of course, is itself a form of presentation and self-promotion), but one which raised a smile (and which recalls a similar stunt pulled by the comedian Tim Vine during the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe). There is, after all, design life outside of Salone.

Baas is Out of Town: various locations

Image: American Hardwood Export Council.

A Travelling Forest

For a number of years, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) has been an important design patron, regularly commissioning emerging practitioners to create objects and installations that showcase the material properties of American hardwoods. Over the course of multiple projects, AHEC has built an enviable portfolio of work, with its 2022 Milan presentation Forest Tales delving back into this archive. Forest Tales, curated by AHEC alumni Studio Swine, is a collection of furniture pieces commissioned by the group over recent years, providing a welcome reminder of quite how much strong work has emerged through AHEC’s programmes (as well as a good opportunity to revisit designs from the likes of Mac Collins, Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska and Maria Bruun). Yet the display is more than this. Studio Swine’s exhibition design and concept has been created to minimise waste, with the furniture pieces exhibited atop a structure formed entirely from the crates in which the work was shipped (subsequently painted with an image of a forest by set painters from Teatro alla Scala). At the end of the display, the works will be shipped back in those same crates. It is an effective and beautiful mode of presentation, and one which takes seriously the environmental challenges raised by design festivals, whose temporary installations frequently end up as trash at the end of the week. Forest Tales is a display of nicely designed wooden furniture (which is pleasant in its own right), but it also an important reflection on the environmental impact of design weeks as a whole.

Forest Tales: Triennale Milano, Viale Emilio Alemagna, 6

*State of the World* by designer Mathieu Lehanneur and curator Maria Cristina Didero (image: Filipe Ribon).

Embodied Data

Reflections on human population, suicide rates, and rising sea levels are, perhaps, a hard sell as a design exhibition, yet this is the challenge that the Inventory of Life, from designer Mathieu Lehanneur and curator Maria Cristina Didero, has set itself. Exhibited in the Triennale, the display is an exercise in visualising data, with Lehanneur having created a series of installations that each tackle new ways of representing statistical data and its subsequent personal interpretation. 50 Seas, for instance, is a series of ceramic circles that each reproduce the precise blue of different seas taken from satellite photographs (the variety is genuinely surprising), while Live/Leave exhibits a series of white canvases with black holes, each representing a different country, with the diameter of each hole indicating the number of suicides in each nation “as a record of the state of our mental health” (and while Disegno was uncertain about the wisdom of representing mental health purely in terms of suicide rates – as well as expressing suicide as a black hole within a pristine canvas – the installation does grant the data an immediacy that is compelling). Yet the star of the show is State of the World, a series of 200-plus anodised aluminium sculptures, whose stepped construction represents the age profiles of different national populations around the world (sculptures thicker at the bottom express a large younger population, those broader at the top an older population). It is a triumphant work, whose material reality makes clear a number of truths captured in the data: it is obvious, for example, how the shape of Cambodia’s sculpture has been radically impacted by the effects of the Cambodian Genocide, while a number of countries such as Afghanistan and Mozambique have forms recalling a chocolate kiss, highlighting uncomfortable facts about the variability of life expectancies across countries. In State of the World, Lehanneur has created something of real power and a work which deserves extended attention: an entire day could be spent comparing and contrasting the different sculptures. It is data made real and visceral.

Inventory of Life: Triennale Milano, Viale Emilio Alemagna, 6

Milan Diaries: Day Two

Obsolescent Masculinity