Designers make light work at Lake Como Design Festival 2024, revisiting heritage traditions

Now in its sixth edition Lake Como Design Festival, organised by Wonderlake, offers a digestible number of events in the city and around the lake. Curated talks and projects are hosted in historic locations, including a Renaissance villa and a medieval municipal building. One particular highlight is a smaller site that has been transformed into a meditative space that answers the call of this year’s theme: ‘Lightness’.

In the city

In the medieval town hall, Palazzo del Broletto, visitors compared a selection of 28 chairs, created between 1924 and 2024. Curated by festival organisers, ‘The Form of Lightness’ exhibition aimed to highlight the contrast between the heavier weight of a body that occupies a chair and the lightness of the chair’s form and the materials employed to create it. The oldest was the ‘Wassily Lounge Chair’ designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925; inspired by a bicycle frame, this minimal Bauhaus icon is a true example of timeless design.

Around the corner from the main square was a collective exhibition at the San Pietro in Atrio. The theme of lightness was interpreted by designers such as Michele de Lucchi, Mario Botta and Rome-based designers Naessi Studio by using a traditional engraving method to create limited-edition prints. This collaboration with Como-based specialist printer Lithos aimed to explore the idea of lightness on paper.

At the Spazio Natta, Erlands and Bai Bai emitted waves of calm with their project ‘8 Days of Lightness’. The result of Erlands’ methodical study of rituals, here lightness was translated as a destination reached through meditation and movement using collectable ‘EB WeightLights’ created by Bai Bai and envisioned by Erlands.

At the lake

Site-specific installations merged with the 16th-century grounds and the architecture of the Villa del Grumello. Several designers and artists of the Contemporary Design Selection curated by Giovanna Massoni stayed on site or nearby, and the community spirit was evident as participants visited each other throughout the week. Both the public’s and participants’ curiosities were piqued. In one of the annexes, Yellowdot’s Bodin Hon and Dilara Kan presented their tableware series 'Hatch Eggserve', featuring repurposed eggshells in transparent disks and mobile brass arms.

Sjang Niedwiesser’s recycled acrylic floor lamps, ‘Liquid’, illuminated a small chapel on the villa’s grounds, the contemporary design resembling slightly melted plastic, that undulates to create depth and dimension.

Inside the villa, the ‘Sister Moon’ chair of Francesco Manfredi and Tommaso Lorenzini, AKA, Dalmoto, was inspired by the lightness reflected off the moon, using a quartz and marble mix for the seat back, boucle for the upholstery and a crescent moon shape for the seat; the designers merged different aspects of our perception of the moon to develop a comfortable chair.

Colour was often used to transmit the idea of lightness, from the matriarchal ceramics entitled ‘Mother Fire, Sister Fire’ by Ilaria Bianchi, whose project used ceramics to explore the theme of the weight of the body and inner lightness. Then there’s Jonathan Bocca’s ‘Barefoot’, a playful installation of paper chairs that express lightness through emotion brought about by joyful colours. Bocca used a material strongly linked to his home town of Lucca in Tuscany, which is traditionally known for paper making.

The festival ran 16 – 22 September 2024, lakecomodesignfestival.com