04.25.24
Fair Report
An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair
In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.