MILAN—With a new location that makes it independent from the Salone del Mobile—the huge international furniture fair that opened here on Tuesday—this year's SaloneSatellite, an event focused on promising young designers, is presenting the work of 650 talents under the age of 35.
Three of the participants will be selected by a committee to receive cash awards, but many more have brought great designs to Milan, and BLOUIN Artinfo Italy has picked a few favorites. To see their work at SaloneSatellite, click on the slideshow.
Dossofiorito (Italy) This Verona-based design duo, composed of Livia Rossi and Gianluca Giabardo, has what must be the greenest booth at Satellite. Their project, “The Phytophiler,” is dedicated to plant lovers with a thing for design. Starting from evidence that the presence of plants in closed spaces improves wellbeing, Dossofiorito created a series of pieces meant to foster an active and loving relationship with your plants. The collection features hand-thrown terracotta pots polished with beeswax and accessorized with various "phytophilic" components: a straw shelter to shade delicate plants; a mirror structure that offers a full rounded view of particularly lush flowers; magnifying glasses to allow careful observation of the health of leaves. The botth's atmosphere recalls a bizarre and playful greenhouse, and these objects suggest novel ways of bringing your relationship with your green friends to the next level.
Tsukasa Goto (Japan) “The human eye sees things in perspective,” says Japanese born, Milan-based designer Tsukasa Goto. “Through this view of the world people imagine many things, enlarging and reducing reality. It is from that imagination that humans create things.” Goto is showing an extremely elegant and detail-oriented selection of three fruit bowls—“Architectural,” “Geographical,” and “Agricultural”—inspired by unusual visual perspectives: a bird's eye view of a building, a full-horizon view of a mountain, and an aerial view of plantations. All of Goto’s creations feature several varieties of marble, from Carrara to Travertino, and reveal the designer’s interest in sculpture and in simple yet powerful narrative.
FROM (Italy, Germany, Portugal) Cesare Bizzotto (born in Padua, 1988), Manuel Amaral Netto (Lisbon, 1983), and Tobias Nitsche (Munich, 1986) met in 2011 while studying at the prestigious ECAL school in Lausanne, Switzerland; after two years they joined forces to create FROM, a studio where everyone lives in and comes from a different country. At the Satellite they are shoeing their “Undercover office,” a clever collection of products that responds to the needs of the ever-expanding “working from home” cohort. If you’re young and ambitious, they reason, you probably don’t have much money or space, but that doesn’t mean you can’t live in style. “Duo” is a sleek steel table that serves as a functional working space, complete with multiple outlets and a drawer to hide your laptop, and then transforms into a dining table. “Volta,” the most interesting piece by this hipster trio, is a neon lamp encased in an aluminium or granite tube-shaped structure. It can be used as a direct office light or, by rotating the tube up, as a soft atmospheric light.
Giorgio Traverso (Italy) “Dynamicube” and “Dynamicube II,” the two lamps Giorgio Traverso brought to SaloneSatellite, created a small sensation in the generally relaxed pavilion on Tuesday. It might be the interactivity of the products, or the fact that this Genoese designer oozes enthusiasm when he talks about his work, but little crowds kept surrounding his booth. Traverso, who works for Italian master Michele De Lucchi, is presenting two versions of a same OLED (meaning bulb-free) lamp with an aluminium structure that suggests a Rubik's Cube that can be contorted into various positions and shapes. Apart from its versatility, the simple lamp proves to be adaptable to different spaces in its floor version, while the tabletop version comes with a wi-fi connection allowing it to be controled from a smartphone, no app necessary.
KimxGensapa (Korea) The Korean duo KimxGensapa have moved away from the popular trend of keeping it simple when it comes to wooden objects. Taking inspiration from Caravaggio’s 1597 painting “Narcissus,” their collection reconsiders ordinary furniture (a chair, a bookshelf, a lamp), imagining it reflected in a mirror. The resulting forms are at once familiar and strange, changing as the light moves over their wooden surfaces. A chair features a slatted window structure that can be used as a temporary magazine storage; a bookshelf reveals a mysterious hidden section for little objects.
