The seventh edition of Lake Como Design Festival will take place from 14 to 21 September 2025, with this year’s theme titled Fragments.
The festival explores the fragment not as a sign of absence, but as a means of reading and assembling the present. The 2025 curatorial approach uses fragmentation to draw connections across materials, contexts, and ways of seeing.
This edition places emphasis on the relationship between objects, stories, and spaces. The city is not treated as a backdrop, but as an active part of the narrative: each exhibition and installation responds to its setting, shaped by the memory and traces that define it.
A key element of the program is the Contemporary Design Selection, curated by Giovanna Massoni and installed along the Kilometre of Knowledge, a route that passes through villas and lakeside gardens.
The exhibition brings together more than forty projects from around the world, each engaging with the theme Fragments without aiming for a unified vision. Every work interprets the fragment in its own way: as a trace, a rupture, or a point of connection.
Some address themes of conflict, migration, and the loss of cultural reference points. Others focus on gestures of care, repair, and identity.
Among the works on view, Yentele embroiders stone fragments, treating them as vessels of memory; Vacuum Atelier reflects on the joint as a site of relation; Lucie Gholam begins with rubble, transforming it into a sensitive material; Justyna Szymanska creates carpets that evoke fractured geological landscapes.
The pieces are not arranged by formal logic. Instead, discontinuity is accepted as part of the language. Some, like those by Eleonora Todde and Lyuda Skrynnykova, dwell on the idea of damaged dwelling. Others, such as Jaipur Rugs and Rugsandrugs, use textiles to hold together history and identity, moving between present and memory.
In addition to the section devoted to contemporary design, the festival includes a space dedicated to significant figures in Italian architecture. One of them is Aldo Rossi, the subject of Architettura per frammenti, an exhibition curated by Chiara Spangaro and installed in the deconsecrated church of San Pietro in Atrio. The title reflects a specific perspective: the fragment as both method and structure.
The exhibition brings together drawings, models, films, and documents that show how Rossi used the fragment as a working tool, holding together memory, form, and narrative. Among the works on view are the film Ornamento e delitto, the 1992 project for Schützenstrasse in Berlin, and the proposal for Segrate’s town hall square with the Monument to the Partisans.
The installation is pared back, intended to support the reading of the works without imposing on them. The sparse interior of the church becomes part of the experience, offering a quiet setting for close observation.
Among this year’s additions is the opening of the new home of the Ico Parisi Design Archive at Via Diaz 11. The launch includes an exhibition focused on a lesser-known part of Parisi’s work: Crolli edificanti, Tavole di provocazione, a series of painted panels produced between the late 1970s and early 1980s. The works combine everyday objects like appliances, cars, architectural elements into compact compositions that reflect a period marked by uncertainty.
In this body of work, Parisi steps away from the image of the measured designer and adopts a more direct visual approach. Showing this series in Como, his hometown, offers a broader view of his practice.
The festival is shaped through collaboration between archives, curators, and local organizations, including Wonderlake Como ETS, the project’s promoter. The program connects design with place, memory, and research, following a curatorial line structured around the idea of the fragment. The 2025 edition will develop these themes through exhibitions, installations, and city-based itineraries.
Lake Como Design Festival – Seventh Edition
- Title: Fragments
- Dates: 14–21 September 2025
- Location: Como and the Lake Como area (multiple venues including the historic center, Kilometre of Knowledge, former Church of San Pietro in Atrio, Via Diaz 11)
- Curators: Giovanna Massoni, Chiara Spangaro, Fondazione Aldo Rossi, Associazione Archivio Design Ico Parisi, Wonderlake Como ETS
