Young designers at the FuoriSalone: where to find them

How young Italian designers work

Someone cultivates a passion (drive) for craftsmanship, has studied cabinet-making, knows the ancient art of carpentry and the history of trees.

Someone instead explores the potential of blown glass which becomes decorative hyperbole, or challenges the rigor of steel to punctuate the space with small loft-sized monuments.

Others reinterpret manual processing techniques to rebuild territories and communities, and still others project today into an elsewhere where digital can easily ferry us. And where you can't survive alone.

And in fact there are those who have gone from words to deeds by furnishing living rooms with perch-seats where even the Cocos and Cornelius, parrot and crow, can find a happy anchorage.

Passwords: materials and traceability

But always and in any case, in the beginning there is the material: natural, regenerated, returned or waste. That of the material is a story within a story whose origin can always be traced and from which, in good design, another story originates.

It's called traceability, and the Formafantasma have taught us to practice it.

There are 100% biodegradable accessories which then return to the earth to fertilize it and wood scraps which are used to grow new domestic architectures.

The new generations take responsibility for the planet

Every single work, whether it's a plate, a bench, a mirror, opens the debate not only on the meaning of the object, its function, hybridization, transversality, but above all on the sense of responsibility towards the Planet: climate crisis and environmental impact are central themes in the development of each of the field trials.

Just as central is the authorial trait of each piece, decidedly well recognizable even if matured in a journey no longer than a decade.

The Italian nouvelle vague thrives on sharing

The Italian nouvelle vague, at Milan Design Week therefore, this year returns a panorama full of uniqueness that feeds on the history of Made in Italy, explores the dimension of participation, to open up to interspecific sharing.

As well described in Italy: A New Collective Landscape, produced by ADI Design Museum, the exhibition is curated by Angela Rui together with Elisabetta Donati of Conti and Matilde Losi, with installation by Parasite 2.0.

See also: Italy: A New Collective Landscape

“Together we try to overcome the nostalgia of Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, the historic exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz at the MoMA in New York in 1972. And to propose a new geography of design”.

The virtues identified by the curator, of a systemic, relational and regenerative nature, suggest new points of observation and listening to today's objects.

Each selected project tells an identity that often becomes a denunciation and manifesto of the complexity of today's times.

We have tried to map the change by listening to these voices.

Where to find young Italian designers at FuoriSalone 2023