LUCE 352

We meet artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, founders in 2007 of DRIFT who create sculptures, installations and performances that fuse technology and nature. Their works, which often feature light, have been exhibited in prestigious international institutions such as the Venice Biennale, The Shed and the Met Museum in New York. Becoming part of permanent collections of world-renowned museums, their works have since crossed its boundaries, reaching architectural spaces and public places. In 2017 they received the Dezeen Designer of the Year award. Their deep fascination with nature fuels their creativity, and through technology they seek to recreate its phenomena. What gives DRIFT its sense of magic is the tension between the artificial and the organic and it is through the mechanical they manage to reflect the fluidity of the natural world and, lastly, light always plays an important role in their works.

“When we develop a work of art or an installation, we consider the inclusion of light – if it plays a role – from the outset, and do not use it simply for an aesthetic or spectacular appeal, but rather its presence has a purpose and meaning seamlessly integrated into the concept from the earliest stages of development. Light becomes part of the DNA of the work, it is never an add-on, not an add-on…”

This story is about light and begins in the darkest dark, during a lunch the author had with marionanni, at the Istituto dei Ciechi in Milan, as he hears his voice telling the story of an electrician (i.e. himself) who gradually grows, opens shops, founds a successful company and after some thirty years leaves it, because he no longer identifies with the logic of selling.  He realised that he had become a different person and so he decided to give himself a mission: to research light and pass on knowledge. marionanni (written like this, without spaces) has changed since he met his two masters: photographer Gabriele Basilico and designer AG Fronzoni. Through his relationship with them, which over time has become a deep friendship, he has begun investigating light, a subject that he used to deal with only in a technical way,  at 360 degrees, gradually handling it with the necessary delicacy and approaching it with poetic thoughts that his collaborators call, with sarcastic affection, “Nanni’s digressions…”

Lee Broom, a British designer who founded the eponymous company in London in 2007, designs unique and eye-catching objects. Considered one of the most influential designers on the international scene, compared to such brilliant designers in the fashion world as Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, Lee Broom has received the British Designer of the Year Award and the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, from the hands of Queen Elizabeth II. He currently works with a selection of global luxury brands such as Wedgwood, Christian Louboutin, Bergdorf Goodman and Lladró.

In the interview he tells us about his relationship with light: “I am in love with light. It is an element that, with its physical and also emotional being, fascinates me deeply. If you think about it, light is magic. Working with light brings about something alchemical, something transformative […]. I find it deeply interesting to experiment and explore with many different materials, especially in the area of lighting. By playing with materials and their qualities you can create new and surprising solutions…”

We meet world-renowned Scottish anthropologist Professor Tim Ingold to talk to him about light and his idea of a New Humanism based on the concepts of nature, rebirth and love for the world. “[…] Regarding the New Humanism, there are many different positions. The contemporary world is in urgent need of a new order, I believe that a New Humanism must recognise that human beings have an exceptional responsibility to care for all forms of life, because we have a unique capacity, based on language, to give voice to these forms of life and to make them dialogue with each other. To exercise this responsibility, human beings must place themselves at the centre of the life-world. Therefore, both Anthropocentrism and Exceptionalism are crucial to my vision of a New Humanism, committed not to progress but to the continuity of life. The novelty lies in rebirth rather than innovation, in many ways marking a return to the pre-Enlightenment humanism of the Renaissance…”

A fine and tortuous common thread runs through culture in the long process of the emancipation of the “luminous dimension” in a difficult but univocal and progressive tendency towards the reading of space as the space of light.

In the famous allegory of the cave, Plato imagines a race of slaves forced to spend their lives chained in a cave. A fire burns behind them, casting shadows of objects on the flat wall in front of them. For the prisoners, these shadows are the only existing reality; they do not know that they possess three-dimensional bodies immersed in a three-dimensional universe and all existing reality, for them, is limited to the two-dimensionality of the plane.

The men confined in the cave sought reality at the vibrating reflections of a fire, and it is at the vibrating reflections of a fire that modern art has pushed its references forward because, then as now, light is the fundamental vector in the process of knowledge of the physical world.

Designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates for Japanese star chef Shinichi Sato, the Blanc restaurant in Paris is a temple of harmony, rarefied light and noble materiality. Immersed in an elegant and minimal aura, it is characterised by the dramatic ring vaulting of the “salle à manger” but also by a refined and delicate colour range, from the predominant tones of white to bronze, and by a lighting design that creates and enhances the scenery. It won the Prix Versailles, an international award assigned by UNESCO, and the IFI award for excellence in design, two prizes that celebrate its creativity, savoir-faire and beauty. The total concept for Blanc, commissioned by the two Michelin-starred chef Shinichi Sato, stemmed from the desire to use only the highest quality and “purest” materials in its construction, as is the case in the food prepared by the chef from Hokkaidō. In fact, each area of the Blanc restaurant has been designed with noble and precious materials to create an exclusive atmosphere using geometries, textures and colours, all emphasised by the lights.

We meet Hervé Descottes, the founder of the lighting design and consultancy firm L’Observatoire International in New York. Won over by light, Descottes, embraces lighting design, personally creates the lighting concepts for all the projects he signs, oversees project development through to completion and collaborates with the biggest international names in architecture.

“[…]Today, the lighting industry is evolving rapidly and, not just within architecture, people seek emotional connections with the spaces they inhabit. Light is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools to shape this experience […] Light seeks emotion. When lighting is designed only to solve a problem, it often lacks depth or interest. What matters is finding a balance between natural and artificial light, not only because they are deeply interconnected, but also because the boundary between them is often blurred. And it’s in that blurriness that something truly unique can emerge …”

In this special issue we have chosen to recount, during the last Milan Design Week, products, installations, performances that reveal passion and skill in spite of the climate of uncertainty dominating the international scenario. They are stories of companies that invest heavily in innovation, research and sustainability, stories of creativity that show us the disruptive force of culture and how it can be the most powerful antidote against all forms of qualunquism, violence and degradation. In particular, light has returned to give strong messages in a world chaos where certainties and values have been overturned.

Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel was one of the protagonists at the first edition of The Euroluce International Lighting Forum, organised by the Salone del Mobile. Her studio in Amsterdam deals with the new discipline of solar design, about which she writes in her book Solar Futures (2022): sustainability, design and technology for everything related to our star called the Sun. Her designs are exhibited at the MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum and other museums around the world. In collaboration with scientists, engineers and global brands such as Swarovski, Lexus, COS, Timberland and institutions such as ECN, the Dutch Energy Centre, Marjan van Aubel works to promote the global energy transition to solar energy…

Asset-intensive industries (industries with high capital intensity) are strongly immersed in the challenging energy transition scenario and many of them play, and will play, an important role as enablers to achieve decarbonisation goals. In this scenario, the digital transformation of industrial processes is of crucial importance to achieve these goals.

This transformation also supports industries as new regulatory frameworks come into effect that for some sectors such as electricity incentivise efficient asset management and maximisation of asset utilisation…

The 19th International Venice Biennale opens its doors with a visionary outlook on the future of Architecture in relation to major planetary, climatic, social and geopolitical changes. The statement by Carlo Ratti, the curator of this edition, in asking to give “a range of solutions to the pressing problems of the present” outlines new routes for the future. It is a very ambitious programme and necessarily exponential in the way it is conceived in the mighty exhibition machine of the Giardini and the Arsenale, particularly in the density of information and project proposals. In fact, the goal of bringing together a series of experimental design proposals, inspired by a definition of “intelligence” seen as the ability to adapt to the environment starting from a wealth of interdisciplinary resources and knowledge, is placed at the basis of the general philosophy of this Biennale. First of all, it should be emphasised that the three themes of reflection Natural, Artificial and Collective are, indeed, closely linked areas of design intervention. They are three different types of intelligence that work together to rethink the built environment, as underlined by the word Intelligens which contains the Latin word gens (“people”), inviting us not to limit ourselves to Artificial Intelligence and digital technologies…

In Milan, at the Dep Art Gallery, an acronym for Distribuzione e Promozione Arte, founded in 2006 by Antonio Addamiano, in via Comelico 40, there is an exhibition of some of the best iridescent works by Regine Schumann (1961, Golslar, Germany). A conceptual and minimalist artist, she is internationally renowned as a “queen” of light, focusing on the luminous effects caused by fluorescent materials, and received the Leo Breuer Prize in 2006 and other prestigious awards for her artistic career.

Among the works created by the artist – who lives and works in Cologne, Germany, and studied art from 1982 to 1989 at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig – the Colormirrors satin blue ice blue cape town (2024) and the more recent works entitled Corners are truly fascinating and stand out for their visual intensity and conceptual depth…