The Contemporary Design Selection of this year is a collective investigation into the evocative power of the fragment. The 2025 open call invited designers, artisans, architects and artists to explore three design perspectives: fragility – the aesthetics of breaking and transformation, the value of the ephemeral and the mutable; the regenerative act – recomposition and recovery, transforming waste into new objects filled with meaning; and memory – as an archive of fragments, a vehicle for stories, techniques and past or forgotten cultures.
Kilometre of Knowledge
Focusing on one of these themes or embracing the poetics of the fragment in its complexity, the participants currently confirmed come from Italy, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Mexico, the United States and Canada. Individuals or collectives, both young and older, direct witnesses of war scenarios marked by unacceptable inhumanity or spokespersons for urgent social and environmental issues, their design work is always, in one way or another, an act of resistance.
Lemon greenhouse, Kilometre of Knowledge
Up greenhouse, Kilometre of Knowledge
The exhibition brings works exploring fragmentation not as loss, but as a creative foundation. Each piece becomes a reflection on time, identity and the scars – personal, socio-political, environmental – that mark people, materials and territories. Through different paths and practices, they tell how what is broken, forgotten, or marginalized can generate new life and new meanings.
CONTEMPORARY
DESIGN SELECTION
Kilometre of Knowledge
Como, via per Cernobbio 11
14-21 September 2025
10 am - 7 pm
entrance with ticket