Roca will bring the Mediterranean to Milan at this year’s Fuorisalone with Influence, an installation designed by Barcelona-based Cobalto Studio which will be on display at the University of Milan (Via Festa del Perdono, 7) from the 6th to the 13th of June.
The installation, Roca’s first ever participation at Fuorisalone, poetically explores Mediterranean culture and tradition. It draws from rationalist architecture and the talaiots, weaving a common thread through to the present with both craftsmanship and technology.
Influence is inspired by Roca’s new Ona Collection (‘Ona’ means ‘wave’ in Catalan), a design line that pays homage to the Mediterranean Sea, its landscapes, lifestyles, colours and scents. Cobalto Studio has adapted these same concepts as its cues for the installation at Fuorisalone 2022.
The installation captures Mediterranean traditions and architecture, finding in them a metaphor of purity and beauty: a heartbeat from the sea’s depths. This large-scale sculpture, housed at the University of Milan, literally pulses with the sea, the rhythm of the waves represented by impulses of golden light, creating an immersive, sensorial experience.
To this end, Influence uses the REDEXT (Deep Water Boats Network) search system, wherein buoys collect wave data, mapping the sea. Cobalto Studio interprets this data, calibrating the installation’s luminosity to the waves’ peaks. The amplitude of the waves’ fluctuations determines the rhythm of the lighting, bathing the visitor in surges of light that transmit the sensation of being submerged in the waves of the Mediterranean.
This immersive environment is inspired by Mediterranean architecture, a style rooted in the aesthetic representation of the essential. Cobalto Studio initiates its design with the talaiots (megalithic constructions native to the Balearic Islands which date back to the Bronze Age), evolving from the Mediterranean basin to the University of Milan in a brutalist style.
Influence forms part of the INTERNI Design Re-Generation event, whose objective is the stimulation of new design proposals in which sustainability is the key value for a new quality of life. By employing reusable materials, Influence borrows from the notion of the optimisation of natural resources present in proto-rationalist Mediterranean architecture, where every design element responds to a specific need (water collection, health, temperature, etc.).
Influence and Roca’s Ona Collection both exalt the notion of the complexity of the elemental, where functionality is achieved via minimal and essential expressions in form. The lightness and purity of these forms convey warmth, simplicity and authenticity, with implicit respect for natural materials.
In this installation, Roca proposes an open dialogue between philosophy and materiality, enriched with sensory experience. The result is an authentic, immersive installation in which the visitor is catapulted to a Mediterranean oasis, a living environment in close contact with nature.
By letting the forms and colours of the Mediterranean Sea travel inland to Milan, Roca brings the new Ona Collection to life via the senses.
