Milan Design Week operates at a pace that rewards speed over reflection, with hundreds of installations vying for attention in just one compressed week. Marcin Rusak Studio’s Forum Flowers: Herbarium of the Present opposes this current. It was directed at SIAMthe Società d’Incoraggiamento d’Arti e Mestieri founded in 1838, the exhibition trades the form of a commercial exhibition space for a 19th-century educational institution and its economy of spectacle Salone for something closer to a study hall.
SIAM was founded to encourage arts and crafts among Milanese workers and remains a public cultural institution serving students, designers and a culturally engaged audience rather than collectors and buyers. Rusak’s decision to place his new work here, rather than in a Brera gallery or a Tortona warehouse, reframes the exhibition as a pedagogical platform. The Latin title, which roughly translates to “flower market”, doubles as an invitation to gather and exchange ideas.
Flower market unfolds in SIAM’s courtyard and two historic interior rooms, with the Flower Journey installation opening the series. The monumental gateway traces the global history of the cut flower industry, an extractive trade that stretches from 19th-century Dutch greenhouse cultivation to today’s Kenyan and Colombian export agriculture. Part 3D printed and part cast in bronze, the structure draws formal cues from unfinished medieval cathedrals and decorative Art Nouveau thresholds.
Beyond the gate is Plant Pulses, an immersive installation developed with Perrier-Jouët which translates ultrasound recordings of plant activity recorded by AGH University researchers Bartłomiej Chojnacki and Klara Chojnacka, in a multisensory environment. Composer Justyna Stasiowska and digital artist Eli Magaziner shaped the data into sound and image, giving form to a register of plant communication that lies beneath human perception.
The exhibition debuts several new statement pieces, including 2.5m herbarium panels that laminate selected flowers and plants between sheets of glass. In addition to a new shelving system, coffee table and mirror that extend Rusak’s flagship Flora line, the projects mark a stylistic and technological shift for the studio. Custom 3D-printed biodegradable appliques complete the staging. Visitors were encouraged to sit, lie down and linger.
Marcin Rusak goes on to say: “The Florum Forum is an invitation to see plants as bearers of memory, knowledge and interdependence – living records through which we can rethink our relationship with materials, time and nature.”
See more information about Marcin Rusak Studio’s website.
Photo: Alessandro Saletta.
