MILAN—Italy’s long affection for bamboo can be glimpsed beyond fashion and design. Franco Maria Ricci’s Labirinto della Masone, the sprawling bamboo maze outside Parma, stands as a testament to its endurance and poetry. Now, Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters exhibition at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano during Milan Design Week 2025 invites a contemporary reassessment of this storied material. Featuring artists and designers from around the world, the exhibition reframes bamboo not...
Now, Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters exhibition at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano during Milan Design Week 2025 invites a contemporary reassessment of this storied material. Featuring artists and designers from around the world, the exhibition reframes bamboo not merely as a traditional element but as a symbol of adaptability, resilience, and beauty—a dialogue that echoes Gucci’s own historic embrace of bamboo, beginning with the Bamboo 1947 handbag nearly eighty years ago.
Throughout the exhibition, contemporary creators offer varied interpretations of bamboo’s form and function. Anton Alvarez’s towering sculpture transforms bamboo into a fountain-like monument to natural force and structural defiance, while Dima Srouji’s Hybrid Exhalations quietly honors anonymous artisans, blending woven bamboo baskets with fragile hand-blown glass. Dutch collective Kite Club turns their gaze to the history of kite-making, engineering a machine to lift nylon and bamboo kites into flight within the still air of the cloistered courtyard. Their joyful improvisation reminds visitors that bamboo’s utility is often matched by its playfulness.
The sense of bamboo as both a workhorse and a refined medium runs through pieces like Laurids Gallée’s Scaffolding, which abstracts the material’s supportive strength into cool, architectural calm, and Nathalie du Pasquier’s PASSAVENTO, a lyrical folding screen marrying bamboo’s rigidity with silk’s softness. Even in the high-tech bamboo-and-neon constructions by the back studio, the tension between natural structure and modern innovation is palpable. Together, these works reaffirm bamboo’s place in contemporary practice—not as a nostalgic relic, but as a living material capable of crossing boundaries between tradition and invention.
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