Designed by Gupica x Visionnaire
Alcova – Milano Design Week 2021

In an abandoned urban forest of the former military area in the Inganni district, buildings from the early 1900s have been invaded by vegetation. On the first floor of the “Casa delle suore” natural light spreads through a small room with two windows, filtered by the leaves of the nature outside that has taken over the building. This shadow zone becomes the setting for the site-specific installation De Rerum Natura designed by Gunilla Zamboni, alias Gupica.

The Aracea lighting design project is a collection of sculptural lamps designed by Gupica for Visionnaire, presented with all its models for the first time at Alcova. A delicate and simultaneously iconic presence, the Aracea lamp takes its inspiration from exotic plants, incorporating their forms and transforming leaves into luminous objects.
The LED light source, like a vital fluid, passes through the central ribbing of the leaf, producing a type of direct light with the possibility of adjustment, simulating the natural movements of a plant.

In this setting, the leaf, represented on its different scales, becomes a symbol, an object of an aesthetic investigation, a leitmotif of the installation in which the lamps are the protagonists, amidst embroidered velvet walls and carpets made of laser-cut sheets of recycled leather.
The project is a reflection on the nature-artifice dichotomy as a constant and a variant of the man-nature relationship. A place where inside and outside merge, creating an unexpected, visionary scenario.