Tiles

Tiles is an installation that reinterprets an ordinary element of architecture and domestic design: the tile. Traditionally rigid, cold, and decorative, it becomes a soft, welcoming, and traversable module. The tiles, made of foam and in an oversized format (100 × 100 × 30 cm), come together in a 5 × 4 meter composition, creating a walkable landscape, closer to a sensory ground than to a cladding surface.
The installation emerges from a provocation: on one side, the visual memory of tradition, evoked through a decorative vocabulary inspired by azulejos, with classical motifs, angels, and recognizable ornamental iconographies; on the other, the introduction of an unexpected quality—softness—which destabilizes perception and redefines the experience of use. The visitor is no longer a spectator but a body in relation: the habitual gesture of stepping on a tile becomes charged with ambiguity. What should be hard yields; what appears decorative becomes structural and relational.
Tiles thus proposes a new way of inhabiting design, in which tactility becomes language and function opens up to experience. The dissonance between what we know and what we experience generates a space suspended between memory and possibility, where ornament is no longer just a surface to be contemplated, but a living material that welcomes the body.

Made for ALFABETI, curated by Giorgio Galotti and Claudia Pignatale. The 2026 project at Foro Italico conceived on the occasion of Internazionali BNL d’Italia 2026 is based on the power of words and human origins.