Formafantasma: the future is alive

Andrea will be the guest of honour for a talk dedicated to virtuous design at next year’s Maison&Objet.

The Formafantasma website has been formatted to minimise energy loss and CO2 emissions during navigation. Most photos can only be viewed on demand, in one click, without unnecessary display. What could be a detail is for something other than Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Ferresin. The two designers have learned to think of a more energy-efficient world down to innocuous gestures. They both graduated in 2009 from the Design Academy in Eindhoven. They took over the management of the geo-design department sometime later to teach the social, economic, territorial and geopolitical implications of today's design. A design where meaning and the production process take precedence over form. Their Formafantasma studio was created in Rotterdam before Andrea and Simone returned to Milan in 2021.

Collaborations with Flos, Rubelli and Cassina

The studio designs products, scenography of spaces and exhibitions. Researchers, as much as they are designers, Trimarchi and Ferresin advise brands on the eco-design of their products. They have just taken over as artistic director of the Venetian fabric house Rubelli. For Kieffer, a house acquired by Rubelli in 2001, they designed a first collection based on linen, wool and hemp, with soft colours obtained without chemical pigments. Their Wireline suspension for Flos is a design reduced to a light tube, a cable and a rubber strap. Their series of “Post Scriptum” ceramics created by Ginori 1735 for Cassina leaves the artisans' black pencil lines on the porcelain biscuit raw. Everything happens as if the two designers wanted to resituate the object in its essence and its origin: a cable for an industrial lamp, a craftsman for a piece of pottery.

Humans after all 

It's the same approach when the duo tackles a scenography. For the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Center in Prato, Tuscany, they presented the works of Andy Warhol and Lucio Fontana in peach-coloured wool hangings. In addition to paying homage to the region's weavers, the panels organise the space and change traditional hangings on white walls. To accompany Prada's “Conversation with a Flower” collection, they organised meetings in arboretums in Paris, London, and New York, “unplugged” without a microphone, to reconnect with humans and plants, without a screen. What do they think of “Tech-Eden”, the Maison&Objet theme of the year? “Technology opens up many opportunities,” they say, “but the future must be, above all, based on people. It must not remain concentrated in a few hands but be controlled by as many people as possible.”