Not simply an installation
At Milan Design Week 2026, while much of the city competed for spectacle, one space quietly chose a different direction entirely.
No scenography built for a week and then dismantled.
No borrowed rooms dressed to look like something they weren't.
Instead, walls covered in raw earth that will still be there for the next edition .
The most radical choice made here had nothing to do with aesthetics.
Simply put: not to scatter.
Pollice Illuminazione and TPF projects invited Terra Migaki Design and ANAB to become part of the project and transform the location in Via Guido D'Arezzo; to explore emerging approaches to materials and the broader cultural discourse connected to sustainability, natural surfaces and bio-based materials.
To take the energy that Design Week generates the attention, the conversations, the momentum and rather than let it evaporate with the last visitor on Sunday evening, transform it into something permanent. A working studio that will continue to host research, music, and dialogue throughout the year.
A place, not an event.
In a week where *temporary* is the default, that is a quietly revolutionary act.
What the Walls Are Actually Doing
Every surface of the location was covered in raw earth plaster ” *terra cruda* developed jointly by Terra Migaki Design and ANAB. These are not decorative finishes applied for effect and stripped back afterwards. Raw earth is hygroscopic: it absorbs and releases moisture, actively regulating the humidity and microclimate of the room. It does not off-gas. It responds to the season. It is fully reversible.
Light didn't simply strike these surfaces, it was absorbed and returned, shifting in quality across the hours, changing how colour and depth were perceived as the day moved. The title *Luce, Terra, Ombra* was not chosen for poetry alone. Light, earth, and shadow were the three living protagonists of an ongoing, real-time performance that no lighting rig could replicate.
Many Hands, One Direction
What struck me most about this space was not any single work within it. It was the number of people from entirely different disciplines, practices, and backgrounds who had converged here around the same conviction: that matter matters, that natural materials are not nostalgic but necessary, and that the way we build and inhabit space has direct consequences for human wellbeing.
Artists and craftspeople worked directly onto the architectural surfaces, not hanging work on walls, but making the walls themselves the medium of expression.
Massimo Chiappetta created sculptural works in dialogue with the earth surfaces solid, gestural, caught in conversation with matter.
Silvia Moro painted her *Hortus Mundi* a Wunderkammer of the natural world onto the plaster.
Claudia Mendini contributed a research piece that moves across the boundary between applied art and thought, engaging earth not as texture but as concept.
Beatrice Loda (les.mural) brought embroidery to the surfaces, layering textile sensibility into raw earth.
Massimo Maffi offered a Zen-inflected stillness as counterweight to the room's richness.
Iwo Soczewka and Maddalena Ferraresi worked with roots organic forms that grounded the space in the literal logic of growth.
Batua Lab suspended a monolith of raw earth mid-air, in quiet tension with Chiappetta's sculpture dense, weighty, defying expectation.
Sculptors Cristina Cela, Irene Finocchiaro, and Daria Tiflea introduced three-dimensional works that shifted the register from surface to volume.
Together, they built what the organisers called a stratification: a layering of art, architecture, and matter that accumulated across the week, each voice adding depth to the others. Not a group exhibition a collective act of transformation.
**45 people. 5 organising bodies. 16 partners. 12 technical sponsors. 1 media partner.**
That is not a niche project. That is a movement gathering density.