Experience Salone del Mobile 2025: a celebration of design’s power to suspend time, illuminate ideas, and bridge cities.
Words DOMENICO COSTANTINI
Milan prepares to decode the language of contemporary design with the 63rd edition of Salone del Mobile, unfolding from April 8 to 13, 2025. No longer merely a trade fair, it emerges as a pulsating organism intertwining aesthetics, philosophy, and anthropology within a continuum of immersive experiences. Far from the paradigm of mere exhibition, the Salone becomes a critical device, a prism through which matter and space are reinterpreted.
Robert Wilson: Light as Archetype
Robert Wilson’s installation, Mother, housed within the austere naves of Castello Sforzesco, is not simply an homage to Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini. It is a visual and sonic interference, a fracture within the iconic temporality of sculpture that, through light and the resonant frequencies of Arvo Pärt, expands the interval between vision and thought. Wilson, decoding matter with the lightness of voids, evokes Louis Kahn’s lesson: “Light makes space appear.” A dialogue unfolds like a palimpsest of emotional stratifications.
Paolo Sorrentino: Waiting as a Narrative Device
Within the fairgrounds, Paolo Sorrentino dismantles the architecture of waiting with La dolce attesa. No longer waiting rooms as non-places, but emotional scenographies where time dissolves into aesthetic suspension. Where the body becomes an inert presence, Sorrentino injects life, transforming emptiness into a field of narrative forces. The director’s absence from the fair becomes a performative act in itself: his voice, a rarefied echo, constructs presence.
Pierre-Yves Rochon: The Villa as Layered Memory
Villa Héritage by Pierre-Yves Rochon is an exercise in present-day archaeology. Far from decorative nostalgia, Rochon interrogates the past as a matrix for the future, where the classical is not static but a dynamic element of the contemporary. Every detail is a threshold; every material, a sedimented memory.
Light for Life, Light for Spaces is the manifesto for the inaugural edition of the Euroluce International Lighting Forum. Curated by Annalisa Rosso, the forum is an ecosystem of thought where light is explored not merely as a physical phenomenon but as a generative principle of urban psychogeographies. The arena designed by Sou Fujimoto is an ephemeral landscape, a porous architecture dissolving the boundaries between interior and exterior.
In parallel, Drafting Futures with Studio Formafantasma deconstructs the idea of furniture as a finished object, exploring the fluid boundaries of circular design. Voices like Lesley Lokko and Valeria Segovia amplify reflections on the future and sustainability.
Bill Durgin: The Body as Project
The visual campaign for Salone 2025, crafted by Bill Durgin, is a radical act: no chairs, no sofas, only the naked body as primary architecture. Skin becomes surface, gesture transforms into geometry, in a synesthesia of forms that dissolves the boundary between design and biology.
MiTo Design Connections: The Geography of Relationships
Finally, MiTo Design Connections redefines the geography of Design Week, binding Milan and Turin into a continuum of industrial and cultural synergies. Beyond the rhetoric of the event, it is a cartography of connections where design becomes an immaterial infrastructure of dialogue between cities.
Salone del Mobile 2025 is no longer a place to visit, but a landscape to traverse.
