More than a way of looking, I would say it is a way of listening. Listening and noticing. As American anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests, noticing can be a form of resistance to our habit of looking only toward an already imagined future. I like her notion of “autumn thinking”, the attention of someone searching for mushrooms on the forest floor, training the eye to find what does not reveal itself at first glance. Every project begins in the attention I give to what I hear from others, and perhaps this is where my background in anthropology comes in most strongly.

It always starts with an input that reaches me from someone else, and it usually grows out of exchanges from which the idea takes shape. This was the case with ON DISPLAY!, the exhibition I recently curated in Venice at Palazzo Lezze Michiel for the collector and patron Silvia Fiorucci and her nonprofit organization La Società delle Api. It came from long conversations about what it means to display, and to interpret, a work of art.

Nine designers and studios, Aldo Bakker, Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi, Formafantasma, Martino Gamper, Odd Matter, Parasite 2.0, Soft Baroque, Bethan Laura Wood and Zaven, were invited to dialogue with works by artists such as John Baldessari, Chiara Camoni, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Sylvie Fleury and Francis Upritchard, among others. Their displays became the subject of the project: an act of interpretation that shapes how visitors see the artworks.

As early as possible. I need exhibition design to be part of the process from the very beginning to carry meaning. I would feel uncomfortable treating something so central to the main idea of an exhibition as simply a background.

This has certainly been the case with Formafantasma and Salone Raritas. The conversation with Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi became fundamental right away, and it continues as we develop the second edition. Their thinking affects mine and vice versa. For this kind of collaboration to work, I think you need to be open to listening while remaining determined about the ideas you believe in, with Simone and Andrea, this balance comes naturally.

Every story is different, and sometimes the most hidden exchanges are the ones that give an exhibition its form. For Salone del Mobile.Milano I worked with Es Devlin on Library of Light, a monumental kinetic sculpture installed in the Cortile d’Onore of the Pinacoteca di Brera. It welcomed around 200,000 visitors and opened the way to a series of variations on the same concept. The dialogue with Grande Brera was decisive in discovering the history of the place and its lesser-known details, such as the only sculpture of a woman in the courtyard, which shaped the entire project.

It happens often, but for Salone Raritas it was moving. Pieces so distant in era, geography, materials, aesthetics, and function spoke the same language; they resonated with one another.

For me, this is the new language of interior design that brings together different elements in harmony, like celestial bodies held in orbit by a gravitational force.

Perhaps the most invisible task is building trust. An exhibition is made of objects and spaces, but behind them is an enormous network of relationships, not always simple. People who agree to take risks, to expose something precious or intimate, to change their minds, to try something that has never been done before.

A large part of my work happens there, it is about creating the conditions for people to feel confident while keeping different expectations and sensitivities in balance. When it works, all that complexity disappears, and what remains feels almost easy!