Cariboni Group will be one of the protagonists of the revolutionary 2023 edition of Euroluce (Hall 13, Stand 202) and has entrusted the design of its display image to Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia and the lighting designer Silvia Perego. Together, they have created a small district inside the new City of Lights.

The City of Lights

For the 2023 edition of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, Lombardini22 has rethought the Euroluce exhibition layout with the aim of creating a platform that can generate new visibility, opportunities and value for the exhibiting companies. The Exhibition – that will be held from 18th to 23rd April 2023 - will therefore be an opportunity to showcase a new way of experiencing the exhibition spaces and reimagining the role of the exhibitors within them.

Lombardini22’s design for Euroluce 2023 is an urban-style layout on a trade-fair scale, enhanced by typical elements that, just like city spaces, allow a series of formal and informal networks to be created. The variety of the roads and streets is, in fact, the baseline of the project from a number of angles, including the visibility of the exhibition “displays” and the provision of complementary services and cultural initiatives to enhance the visitor’s experience.

Cariboni Group: the stand

A central tree-lined square surrounded by covered pathways directs the visitor’s gaze towards the City of Lights while also attracting attention to its own interiors, by arousing the curiosity of passers-by and encouraging them to enter. The City of Lights concept is based on the intuition that shadow is an inclusive entity, fundamental for displaying light.

The stand consists of barrel-vaulted structures, each of which houses a new product line for lighting outdoor spaces. Shadow is beautiful and useful. It sculpts objects and recounts their story. This is the spirit with which Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia and Silvia Perego have interpreted the exhibition theme of urban light.

To understand this experience better we have asked them a few questions.

The Cariboni Group stand consists of a small district with distinctive architecture inside the City of Lights. Where did the inspiration come from?

Light combines many things. It can describe places and spaces with great simplicity, as well as recounting the atmospheres, connections and interruptions that exist between their different parts. Its counterpoint to shadow and its contrast with darkness also create a reciprocal existential balance. It envelops and sculpts physical bodies and their movement, in a continuous time dimension of ebb and flow. With Cariboni, we shared our aim of staging a space expressing different imagery, defining multiple sequences outside, inside and on pathways, and creating landscapes written with light.

How does the exhibition space represent the company? Which aspects of the Cariboni Group are expressed in the architecture?

We wanted to stage a space with Cariboni that would evoke a range of imagery and define a multiple sequence of exteriors, interiors, passages and differentiated perspectives that would create a landscape of light. Not simply as a support, but as an expression of the essence of the relationship between immateriality and physicality. Our idea was to repeat, with varying shapes, the cross-section of a vaulted arch, an archetype that generates an immediate contrast between light and shadow, line and curve, static structural tension and the dynamic tension of light. Our experience evokes milestones, stations of "imaginary realism", lands, cities, and intimate and public spaces, conceptually based on De Chirico's Italian squares, in whose pictorial dimensions, space obeys the rule of light and shadow.

Is recounting urban light in a 300sqm exhibition space, a fascinating challenge? How did having to display light affect the design of the exhibition space?

The Cariboni company welcomes and expresses a humanistic sensitivity that is not antagonistic, but supports technology and the pragmatism of production. It looks for interaction, exchange and harmony with environments and people. The design of the exhibition space is rooted in this shared sensibility. In 300 square meters we have tried to create a microcosm of Cariboni thought and action. This is the most fascinating part of our relationship with the company. It is a quest to find the ideal connection between design breakthroughs and practical construction. In this way, the design itself becomes a form of «light hosting light».