Chainmail chairs and missile planters: design embraces the shadows in Milan

There’s a school of thought that in times of sadness, artists and designers push back, producing ever more joyful and colourful work. Curator Valentina Ciuffi isn’t convinced. ‘Ignoring what you are living through is the worst thing you can do,’ she says plainly. ‘I believe the only way to deal with something dark or something difficult is to deal with it before you can move on and find something positive again.’

There is certainly much darkness to contend with today – climate anxiety, political unrest, personal upheavals – and in her latest show for collectible Milan design gallery Delvis (Un)Limited, ‘Dark Times, Bright Signs’, Ciuffi puts her theory to the test. The exhibition gathers work that expresses – sometimes consciously, sometimes not – the turbulence of our era, exploring what happens when designers absorb and transform this darkness rather than deny it.

The results are at once medieval and posthuman in their appearance: chainmail chairs, corseted seats, missile-like planters, luminous objects that glow like eclipses or rebirth suns, holding up a mirror to society. ‘Some works speak of violence done to the body, others of inner darkness, or of ecological grief,’ Ciuffi notes. ‘Creativity, to me, is a way in which you can fight what could [otherwise] permeate you and keep you passive.’

As for the ‘bright signs’, there are moments of levity too: Joy Herro’s missile-shaped planter delivers a dark joke about our times – trying to care for nature while everything around us feels like it’s falling apart; Diaphan Studio’s 'Horizon' lamp ignites like a sunrise after a long night, while Wei Xiaoyan’s 'Opia' aims to linger in the darkness rather than dazzle. On the opening night this week, artist Jirah performed 'Sitting with Self', reshaping a self-portrait live – a ritual of undoing and remaking that echoes the show’s deeper question: how do we continually remake ourselves, even as the world falls apart? ‘These works recall the body so much that performance felt natural to me,’ Ciuffi says. ‘It brings a physical presence into the space – I always try to include a performative element in my shows.’

The exhibition design is by Space Caviar, the research and design studio founded by Joseph Grima, who also co-founded design platform Alcova alongside Ciuffi. The layout, Ciuffi tell us, is immersive but restrained, with Space Caviar creating a darkened setting punctuated by pools of light and pieces like Duccio Maria Gambi’s monolithic stones staged almost like a scene from '2001: A Space Odyssey'. ‘Dark Times, Bright Signs’ marks the duo’s second exhibition for Delvis (Un)Limited, a gallery that gives them what Ciuffi calls ‘the freedom to experiment’, with plans already underway for future exhibitions in Miami and Milan.

While Ciuffi is clear that ‘Dark Times, Bright Signs’ doesn’t promise solutions for a world in polycrisis, it does offer the strange beauty of looking into the darkness and finding, unexpectedly, a glimmer of light.

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