The seventh edition of the Lake Como Design Festival

From September 14 to 21, 2025, the Lake Como Design Festival returns for its seventh edition—one of the most extensive and multifaceted to date. At the heart of the program is the return of the Contemporary Design Selection, curated by Giovanna Massoni, alongside two exhibitions dedicated to pivotal figures in Italian design history: Aldo Rossi and Ico Parisi. Guiding the entire festival is a new central theme, Fragments, which becomes both its conceptual and narrative key.
In a world shaped by crises, conflict, and natural disasters, fragmentation is omnipresent. Yet the festival reimagines it as a regenerative process, an act of resistance, and a means of rebuilding and reconnection. This powerful message takes form in exhibitions, installations, itineraries, and dialogues spread throughout the city of Como and along the lake’s shores.


Aldo Rossi, La piazza di Nantes, 1985 © Estate of Aldo Rossi. All rights reserved 2025-Bridgeman images

In collaboration with the Fondazione Aldo Rossi, the exhibition at the former church of San Pietro in Atrio explores the concept of the fragment in the architect’s body of work through drawings, photographs, texts, and archival materials. From his early designs of the 1960s to the film Ornamento e delitto, and the 1990s reconstruction of a Berlin city block, the exhibition offers a journey through memory and vision.
Ico Parisi is the focus of the exhibition Crolli edificanti – Tavole di provocazione, which inaugurates the new headquarters of the Archivio Design Ico Parisi on Via Diaz. On view are large-format paintings created between the late 1970s and early 1980s—never before exhibited in Como—in which the artist reflects on the decline of modern domestic life through fragmented, disquieting images of everyday objects—televisions, cars, and household appliances—reimagined as symbols of a domestic identity in crisis. The exhibition also marks the opening of the archive to the public: a space designed by Marco Balzarotti, housing documents and artworks, now accessible for study, research, and direct consultation, offering a space for learning and exchange.

The Contemporary Design Selection is the festival’s core, once again curated by Giovanna Massoni, and hosted within the enchanting setting of the Chilometro della Conoscenza — a 15-hectare urban park connecting historic villas and lakeside gardens. With exhibitions set in greenhouses, lemon houses, and other scenic natural spaces, the site is transformed into a diffuse kunsthalle. Organized in collaboration with Associazione Villa del Grumello and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, the project further strengthens its ties to Como’s cultural landscape. Here, the theme Fragments is explored through three interpretative lenses: fragility, as the aesthetic of rupture and transformation; regeneration, the creative reuse of discarded elements; and memory, as an archive of techniques, symbols, and identities.
 

The selected participants—designers, artists, architects, and makers from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East—bring unique perspectives on war, identity, the environment, the body, and belonging. Works on view range from the narrative rugs of Jaipur Rugs’ weavers to the mythic storytelling of Sierra Kanistanaux, from Adélie Ducasse’s luminous ceramic compositions to Giulia Paradell’s landscape-books, from Abreham’s meditations on scarring and embodied memory to the visual, textile, and material fragments of Lucie Gholam, Atelier WA=MA, Studio Zingì, Thomas Kurer, Rugsandrugs, Studio Zero, Yentele, Justyna K. Szymanska, Yunju Jung, and many others. Each of them presents a design language in which imperfection becomes poetic, damage takes on form, and absence gives rise to new narratives.


Casa Del Fascio, Como - ph Enrico Cano 

The program also includes Studio Visit, which offers rare access to local design studios, galleries, ateliers, and archives, enabling visitors to meet directly with the region’s creative talents. Additionally, architectural tours of Rationalist Como further emphasize the deep connection between landscape, history, and innovation. The Lake Como Design Festival 2025 confirms itself as much more than an exhibition event—it is a narrative ecosystem where fragmentation becomes a lens to examine the present and a tool to envision the future.