Staged in the courtyard and two adjacent rooms of the historic Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Crafts (SIAM) in central Milan, Forum Florum: Herbarium of the Present debuted the studio’s new body of work through a considered presentation uniting botanical inquiry and material experimentation. With its name drawn from the Latin for a flower market, the show was conceived as an artistic and educational platform challenging the urgency of the global design events calendar and inviting visitors into a timely reflection on nature and culture, biodiversity and sustainability, and the materials that shape contemporary life.

The presentation opened towards the Flower Journey installation: a monumental narrative portal tracing the global history of the cut flower industry. Moving across geographies and time, the work reveals systems of cultivation, extraction, and circulation, showing how nature is shaped through human intervention. Captured in a state of becoming, partially 3D-printed and partially cast in bronze, the portal formally and symbolically alludes to unfinished Medieval cathedrals and ornamental Art Nouveau thresholds exemplified by the famed Sagrada Família by Antoni Gaudí.

Plant Pulses, an immersive installation created in collaboration with Perrier-Jouët, offered a multisensory encounter with the subtle intelligence of the plant world. The titular ultrasound pulses, documented by Bartłomiej Chojnacki and Klara Chojnacka, researchers from Cracow’s AGH University, were made visible and audible through an artistic collaboration with composer Justyna Stasiowska and digital artist Eli Magaziner.

Central to the presentation was the Glaes sculpture: a time capsule encasing three hero plants crucial to the ecosystem of Epernay in Champagne. The surrounding Protoplasting Nature stools, whose shapes were informed by the vine plant, invited engagement and comtemplation.

Forum Florum took the theme of herbarium as both a conceptual and material point of departure. In the studio’s interpretation, functional objects and contemporary sculptural works double as memory capsules that, through a curated preservation of plants in custom materials, document the status of botany today and transmit contemporary ecological conscience further into the future. The free-standing Flora Amber screen explores the interplay of light and material through densely composed floral layers, visible across different surface treatments. Reflected in polished stainless steel, the piece creates an intimate architectural framework.

Developed in dialogue with the studio’s archive, the Flora Shelving Unit preserves fragments of organic life within a custom-developed resin material. Framed by a careful assembly of archival Flora off-cuts, the piece acts as a living archive of the studio’s evolving visual language and material experimentation, offering a new spatial language that blends art, architecture and function.

Bringing together the archival gesture of botanical preservation while elaborating on the studio’s heritage-informed visual language, the new body of work presented at Forum Florum deepens the studio’s investigation into botany, temporality and transformation, highlighting the role artistic research and material development play in shaping a more conscious relationship with the natural world.
In the Flora Herbarium, botany is turned into memory, deepening the relationship between man and nature. Fragments of organic life are encapsulated within a resin-based material, forming a unified composition defined by rhythm, density, and internal order.

The new aesthetic language offered by Flower Infused Glass integrates plant preservation into the spatial experience, blurring the lines between art, nature and architecture. From bespoke sculptural pieces to expansive surfaces, the medium demonstrates a versatility that expands on the importance of historical herbaria, transforming the environment into a vessel for captured nature, where botanical inquiry and material experimentation define the surrounding space.

In Flower Infused Glass, botanical elements, chosen for their sculptural form and symbolic weight, are fossilised in a state between life and its arrest. Sealed within layers of tempered glass, they exist as both image and structure. It is a poetic reframing of the herbarium: a suspension where natural vibrancy meets crystalline stillness, elevating the traditional botanical plate into a medium of light, colour, and shadow.

The collection marks the debut of a new stylistic and technological direction within the studio’s practice. Suspended within expandable, polished stainless steel and brushed aluminium structures, the glass surfaces offer kaleidoscopic, abstract patterns that, while preserving plant specimens, knowledge, and traces of the natural world, invite wonder and delight.

Staged within an immersive environment, surrounded by light, colour and shadow transmitted through the Flower Infused Glass installation, the exhibition concluded with archival pieces from Tephra and Protoplasting Nature collections. The experimental Protoplasting Nature Chair, recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, highlighted our long-standing interest in capturing beauty at the edge of decomposition. As a balancing act discussing beauty and ephemerality and commemoration, Forum Florum invited viewers to see plants as carriers of memory, knowledge, and interdependence – living archives through which we can rethink our relationship with materials, time, and nature.

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage under the Creative Industries Institute’s Development of Creative Sectors programme.