The Cloisters of San Simpliciano are a space steeped in temporal stratifications and symbolic significance. Here, Gucci presented “Gucci | Bamboo Encounters,” a curatorial incursion that transcends the mere celebration of an iconic material for the house. Under the direction of Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and his studio 2050+, the exhibition takes shape as an epistemological device capable of destabilizing established narratives, offering a reading of bamboo that oscillates between material anthropology and futurological speculation.
The choice of Pestellini Laparelli as curator is no accident. His practice, marked by a nomadic approach spanning architecture, museography, and socio-political research, makes him the ideal vector for a project aiming to deconstruct hierarchies between design, craftsmanship, and contemporary art. Studio 2050+, whose name already evokes a temporally ambiguous positioning — simultaneously grounded in the present and projected toward an indeterminate future — acts as an agent of complexity, interrogating bamboo not only as raw material but as a cultural signifier imbued with post-colonial, ecological, and productive implications.
The conceptual architecture of the exhibition unfolds through seven interventions, each functioning as an exploration of what might be called the “liminal space of bamboo” — the threshold where material and immaterial, tradition and innovation, East and West contaminate each other. At the heart of the smaller cloister space, Pestellini Laparelli has placed an octagonal architectural element that becomes the spatial and symbolic fulcrum of the entire operation: not merely an exhibition device, but a true forum, a contemporary agora that, throughout the week of the Salone, transformed into a space for relationship, discussion, and dialogue. This structure hosted a dense program of encounters, debates, and conversations with Italian and international cultural figures, amplifying the discursive dimension of the project and underscoring that the exhibition is conceived not as a mere presentation of objects, but as a catalyst for critical thought and intellectual exchange.
In PASSAVENTO (2025), Nathalie Du Pasquier, a seminal figure of the Memphis movement, offers a reflection on the porosity of boundaries. The screen — an archetypal threshold object — becomes a metaphor for fragmented, multifaceted identity: the structural rigidity of bamboo contrasts dialectically with the fluidity of printed silk, creating a material counterpoint that evokes tensions between modernity and tradition, between industrial seriality and artisanal uniqueness. In this operation, Du Pasquier reactivates the memory of the Memphis group, with its critique of modernist functionalism, applying it to a contemporary context dominated by ecological urgency.
Anton Alvarez’s bronze sculpture 1802251226 (2025) represents an ontological paradox: the fixation in a noble and heavy material like bronze of the lightness and formal randomness of bamboo. The Swedish-Chilean artist, known for his experiments with design processuality, enacts a conceptual inversion: it is no longer the material that determines the form, but a form inspired by a material that is translated into another, generating a perceptual short circuit that questions the very foundations of artistic mimesis in the Anthropocene era.
With Hybrid Exhalations (2025), Dima Srouji unfolds a narrative of cultural resistance. The hybridization of bamboo baskets and hand-blown glass by Palestinian artisans in the West Bank transcends formal aesthetics to assume political significance: the fragility of glass becomes a metaphor for the existential precarity of a culture under siege, while the resilient structure of bamboo alludes to adaptability and survival. Srouji’s work challenges the Western rhetoric of craft as a decontextualized practice, reinserting it into a framework of geopolitical urgency.
The Kite Club collective presents an intervention that directly engages with the architectural space of the Cloisters. Suspended kites activate a performative dimension that transcends the object: bamboo, traditionally used as a structural material in kite-making across various Asian cultures, here becomes a vehicle for a poetics of elevation and lightness. Their suspension in the sacred space of the Cloisters generates a semantic tension between spiritual ascension and play, between contemplation and interaction.
Scaffolding (2025) by Laurids Gallée enacts a radical conceptual shift: the reinterpretation in blue resin of traditional Asian bamboo scaffolding subverts expectations of material authenticity. The choice of resin — the quintessential synthetic material — to simulate an organic structure places the work in a zone of ontological indeterminacy, suspended between simulacrum and reinterpretation, homage and appropriation. Gallée thus questions the increasingly blurred boundaries between natural and artificial in an era of technical reproducibility extended to materiality itself.
With the Engraved series (2025), Sisan Lee explores the possibilities of a neo-craft where cast aluminum meets bamboo details. Lee’s operation enters what could be called an archaeology of the future: by recovering Korean aesthetics centered on the concept of subtraction, the artist projects traditional techniques into a post-industrial scenario. The balance between organic imperfection and technological precision that characterizes “Engraved” becomes emblematic of a contemporary design seeking to reconcile productive efficiency with the semantic richness of error and variation.
The Back Studio ideally closes the exhibition path with Bamboo Assemblage n.1 (2025), an installation integrating bamboo structures with neon lighting elements. The juxtaposition of the organic materiality of bamboo with the artificial glow of neon becomes an allegory of the contemporary condition — suspended between nostalgia for a harmonious relationship with nature and fascination with the possibilities of technological innovation. The unresolved tension between these poles generates a space of productive ambiguity, where design becomes a tool of inquiry rather than resolution.
The curatorial strategy of Pestellini Laparelli and 2050+ transcends traditional exhibition logic, configuring itself as an experiment in speculative ecology. Bamboo becomes a pretext for a broader reflection on the interrelations among cultural, economic, and environmental systems in the era of globalized capitalism. The choice to include a plurality of perspectives and approaches — from neo-primitivism to technological speculation, from traditional craftsmanship to digital production — reflects the complexity of a present marked by the coexistence of diverse and often contradictory temporalities.
In this sense, “Gucci | Bamboo Encounters” can be read as a deconstruction of the linear narrative of progress that has dominated modern design. Bamboo, an ancient material yet perfectly aligned with contemporary criteria of sustainability, embodies this temporal compression: it is simultaneously archaic and futuristic, local and global, specific and universal.
The octagonal structure designed by Pestellini Laparelli at the center of the Cloisters physically embodies this plural and non-linear perspective. Through a cultural program that brought together theorists, designers, anthropologists, and artists throughout the duration of Fuorisalone, the space became a platform for collective inquiry into themes of materiality, sustainability, and transdisciplinary practices. These encounters, far from being mere side events, constitute an essential component of the curatorial project, extending the reflection on bamboo beyond the exhibition itself and activating unexpected connections between diverse bodies of knowledge. The dialogic format adopted reflects an epistemology of complexity, where knowledge emerges not as the product of a singular authority but as a relational and distributed process.
Within this interpretive framework, Gucci’s operation represents a paradigmatic departure from traditional luxury brand logic. It is no longer simply a strategy to enhance the cultural heritage of the maison, but a radical repositioning in which the Florentine brand transforms into a true platform for cultural production. By celebrating bamboo — an element deeply iconic to its identity —through a speculative research device, Gucci abandons the self-referential posture typical of the luxury sector and adopts that of a cultural agent capable of catalyzing critical reflection, stimulating intellectual debate, and promoting transdisciplinary interaction.
This high-density cultural initiative marks a significant evolution in the relationship between fashion and contemporaneity: no longer mere appropriation or citation of artistic and cultural references, but active participation in the production of critical discourse. The brand thus becomes a promoter of a new relational ecology that connects design, art, anthropology, and critical theory, offering a space for thought that transcends commercial logic without denying it. The choice of the Cloisters of San Simpliciano as the exhibition venue amplifies this dimension: the dialogue between the contemporary nature of the works and the historicity of the context generates a temporal friction that reflects the contradictions of the postmodern condition, while underlining the maison’s ambition to insert itself into a long-term cultural genealogy.
“Gucci | Bamboo Encounters” thus emerges as a meta-reflective operation that interrogates not only the contemporary significance of bamboo but also the very foundations of curatorial practice and meaning-making in the experience economy. In a cultural landscape dominated by acceleration and superficiality, the exhibition proposes a contemplative deceleration, inviting a layered reading where material and conceptual, aesthetic and political, local and global are inextricably intertwined.
Bamboo, in the vision of Pestellini Laparelli with 2050+ and the seven participating designers, becomes an emblem of a relational ontology that transcends Western dichotomies between nature and culture, subject and object, authentic and artificial. It is in its ability to inhabit interstitial spaces and resist rigid categorizations that bamboo perhaps reveals its most disruptive potential as the material of the future — not so much for its physical properties, but for its symbolic charge of resilience, adaptability, and continuous regeneration.
