Prada Frames: Being Home
Prada, 2024
Prada Frames¹ is a multidisciplinary symposium curated by Formafantasma that explores the complex relationship between ecology and design. Running in parallel to Milan’s Salone del Mobile², Prada Frames brings together scholars and professionals from various fields, including anthropologists, architects, scientists, activists, designers, curators and legal and economic experts —deploying a transdisciplinary methodology and a shared environmentally attentive approach.
The collective effort aims to frame, analyze, contextualize and define new perspectives on a plethora of themes. For its third edition ‘Being Home’, Prada Frames examines the living environment as a framework to address contemporary challenges. The home is not merely a source of comfort; it acts as a shelter and an infrastructure of services. This constantly evolving space is also where socio-economic norms have historically been shaped.
The symposium explores domestic infrastructures, housing precarity, socio-economic structures and systems of governance, the impact of technological advancements on sleep, leisure, and labor, societal biases, and alternative forms of togetherness and intimacy. Prada Frames included contributions from Paola Antonelli, Brigitte Baptiste, Kate Crawford, Jack Halberstam, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Anna Puigjaner, Alice Rawsthorn, Isabella Rossellini, and Françoise Vergès among others.
The event took place from Sunday, April 14, through Tuesday, April 16, at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan, located at Via Gesù 5. The venue, a residence until 1974, is a nineteenth-century neo-Renaissance house featuring fifteenth and sixteenth-century objects and furniture. It is a unique example of overlapping centuries and stands as an early example of Milanese design. For this occasion, the house opened its doors for intimate conversations and thematic lectures. The sessions were simultaneously hosted in the living room, bedroom, dining room, bathroom, and library, creating an uninterrupted exchange of information across the space.
Prada Frames is a project established to collectively explore and share ideas, with a scientific yet educational and informative approach. The inaugural symposium in 2022, ‘On Forest’, delved into the forest environment, examining the principles governing the modern timber industry and extending this discourse to the transformative potential of design and science. The subsequent symposium, ‘Materials in Flux’ held initially in Hong Kong and later in Milan, concentrated on the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of materials. It investigated the notion of waste as a perpetually evolving entity, drawing upon research by anthropologist Tim Ingold.
