During Milan Design Week 2025, Formafantasma unveiled Staging Modernity at Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber, on view from April 7th to 13th. The immersive installation—part performance, part exhibition—marked the 60th anniversary of Cassina’s production of the Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand Collection. Directed by Fabio Cherstich and enriched with commissioned texts by Emanuele Coccia, Andrés Jaque, and Feifei Zhou, the project explored the layered legacy of modernity.
Taking inspiration from the 1929 Salon d’Automne in Paris, Formafantasma deconstructed its floor plan into a series of fragmented scenes, scattered like unfinished sketches across the space. These fragments evoked a vision of modernism once whole, now fractured and open to reinterpretation. Rather than glorifying the past, the installation cast a critical eye on modernism’s binary logic—rational versus organic, human versus animal.
Three key interventions anchored the space. One reimagined the iconic tubular metal furniture by Le Corbusier and his collaborators not as pristine industrial objects but as fractured symbols of a modern ideal. Another featured large-scale animal reproductions, confronting the modernist tendency to exclude the non-human. A third incorporated live performance, sound, and movement, dissolving the boundary between object and spectator.
The entire theatre functioned as a speculative environment, where performers animated philosophical reflections on nature, technology, and design. Visitors first encountered a didactic foyer tracing the evolution of the Cassina Collection, before stepping into the multisensory installation. The scenography—enhanced by sound design, voice, and choreography—offered an embodied critique of 20th-century ideals.
Staging Modernity invited audiences to reconsider modernist ideology not as a fixed doctrine, but as a porous system—forever in dialogue with nature, history, and the possibilities of the present.
Photography by ALESSANDRO CELLI, GABRIELE MILANESE, OMAR SARTOR