This year’s Milan Design Week, the world’s largest design festival, held every April, featured an outlier from the typical venues – and “typical” meant palazzos, villas and theaters, as well as a deconsecrated church, a tennis club and an outdoor pool – was a former slaughterhouse. Here Alcova, an annual independent fair, staged an exhibition in a series of industrial spaces in the Calvairate district, just east of the city centre.
This year “somehow has gone even further,” said curator Joseph Grima, who founded Alcova with Valentina Ciuffi in 2018. After their fifth year, which concluded last weekend, the duo are considering a move to increase Alcova’s presence to be expanded (further details to be confirmed and announced) with a debut at Miami Art Week in December.
For design aficionados, Alcova has become a must-see destination, and something of a palate cleanser from the sheer extravagance of Milan Design Week.
A sleazy upstart known for taking over dilapidated buildings from Milan’s industrial past — including a bakery, a cashmere factory and a military hospital complex — Alcova recorded more than 90,000 visitors this year, or nearly a third of the registered visitors to Salone del Mobile, the trade fair fair and commercial juggernaut around which many of Milan Design Week’s side events, including Alcova, revolve.
“It’s a young energy there, almost like a music festival vibe,” said lighting designer Lindsey Adelman. “They’ve created a real magnet of a show that everyone makes a point of going to.” A fixture of New York’s independent design scene, Ms. Adelman exhibited at Alcova in 2021 and returned this year to showcase work from LaLAB, her new collection of experimental lighting works.
Alyse Archer-Coité, a New York design researcher, noted how the vastness of the “vast, overgrown, and at times haunted” site made for “a truly unique environment.”
Mr Grima, 46, and Ms Ciuffi, 44, met several years ago as former editors of two Milanese design magazines – Mr Grima had been at Domus and Ms Ciuffi at Abitare. Mr. Grima is the creative director of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands and runs a studio practice, Space Caviar, with its co-founder, Tamar Shafrir; Ms. Ciuffi is the founder and director of Studio Vedet in Milan, a graphic design and branding studio that also curates FAR, a capsule of experimental work shown each year at Nina Yashar’s esteemed Nilufar Gallery, one of the top spaces for contemporary design of the city.
With Alcova, they have tried to provide space for emerging and independent design that – for example due to commercial viability or financial and artistic reasons – may not get the chance to showcase in the existing landscape of events at the larger fair.
What Alcova prioritizes is works that go beyond aesthetics to “somehow question the way things are done,” Mr Grima said. Some of the projects on display, he added, “are not products or furniture per se, but processes or materials” that consider the full life cycle of an object, from what it takes to make it to the aftermath of its destruction. use it.
For example, the research platform Atelier Luma, based in Arles, France, shared an installation of prototypes, made from various agricultural by-products such as salt, algae and rice straw, supporting ‘circular design’, a regenerative approach that involves continuous reuse of materials. An injection-molded chair from California-based Prowl Studio made from compostable hemp and paper pulp—two by-products of industrial cannabis processing—challenged the idea that good design should last forever with the tagline, “Expect death.”
A specially curated segment of the show, Alcova Project Space, explored emerging themes including “digital ornamentalism,” an aesthetic shaped by NFTs and video games and meticulously represented in physical forms, as seen in the work of Ryan Decker, Hannah Lim and Isabel Rower.
“What we really wanted to build was more of a social network,” Ms. Ciuffi said. “We compile the list of participants, but then they manage their own space.”
Over the years, that network, which started with a group of about twenty like-minded colleagues and friends during their first edition in 2018, has grown steadily (the physical fair was canceled in 2020 and replaced by digital content due to the pandemic).
Alcova has also served as a sort of launchpad for new talent. A breakthrough star, Maximilian Marchesani, made waves last year with his debut collection of experimental lighting designs that reflected on the tenuous relationship between nature and man-made artifice, a combination of gnarled hazel branches and LED lighting.
In the space of a year, Mr. Marchesani has become the subject of a solo exhibition, with the approval of Ms. Ciuffi, at Nilufar Gallery. For Mr. Marchesani, it’s a giant leap that still feels a bit surreal to him.
“You want to be a protagonist in some way, and you’re always a guest,” said Mr. Marchesani, who moved to Milan as a student more than ten years ago. “Now suddenly I’m not a guest anymore.”
Like many startups that have gained scale and critical attention, Alcova has not been immune to criticism. Last week, in an opinion essay in The Architect’s Newspaper, Andrea Bagnato, a writer and researcher based in Milan who has worked with Mr. Grima, pointed to the show’s itinerant presence in the city’s historic working-class neighborhoods as an agent of gentrification and realism. . real estate speculation.
In a letter this week to The Architect’s Newspaper, Mr. Grima and Mrs. Ciuffi that Mr. Bagnato “was problematic because it confuses causation with correlation”. Alcova, the founders noted, never stays in one location for more than two years, to prevent an area from becoming a sort of design district that encroaches on local neighborhoods. Mr. Grima and Mrs. Ciuffi also ensure that potential sites are not put up for sale. The current location, they pointed out, was already planned for a major redevelopment before they bought it.
“You cannot allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good, and urban planning is complicated,” said Mr. Grima. “We will try to bring moments of joy and generosity to the city. That is something we can and will do.”
