“Ettore carried his Leica with him wherever he went, just as a smoker never leaves home without cigarettes," says Barbara Radice, journalist, art curator and Sottsass’s partner for 30 years until his death in 2007, in an interview with Domus. It is upon these years of travelling around the world, sharing dinners with friends and experiencing deeply intimate moments together as a couple that Radice has built “Mise en scene”, an exhibition paying tribute to their life together and showcasing a selection of previously unpublished photographs from 1976 until Sottsass’s death.

Sottsass was many things. He was one of the most internationally renowned Italian designers and an architect of built works and provocative drawings. He joined the Alchimia movement in the 1970s and later founded the Memphis group at the end of the 1980s. He was also a photographer — not professionally, although he would have liked to be — but he was almost obsessed with photography. Between 2004 and 2006, he published several photos in Domus under Stefano Boeri's direction. He wrote a column titled Photos from the Window, which was later published as a book by Adelphi in 2009.

However, the photos displayed on the walls of the Triennale Milano — both black-and-white and colour images pinned to the wall with simple thumbtacks — were not all taken by Sottsass with his beloved 21 mm Leica: some were taken by a Tunisian restaurant waiter, family friends and Barbara, his wife. “I didn't shoot with the Leica — I often used a Nikon, partly because the Leica was always around his neck,” she says with a smile.

Barbara Radice

Spanning thirty years of the couple’s life and the world that revolved around them, this photographic journey unfolds chronologically like a dense mosaic of images, with roughly 1,200 photos conveying their story. “This exhibition is intended to be very free, just as their life was. They were possessed by life,” Michela Sessa, co-curator of the exhibition, tells Domus.

Among the photos are images of the couple with their friends Andrea Branzi and Michele De Lucchi, as well as Alessandro and Livia Mendini. Also present are figures such as Helmut Newton, Mick Jagger and the unexpected Frank Gehry, who is captured in the act of looking at drawings. The settings span the most diverse locations, from Iran and Polynesia to Jerusalem and Filicudi in the Aeolian Islands, where the couple spent many of their summers.

And then there are the most intimate photos, those portraying Ettore and Barbara in their most private moments. He in a marble bathtub in India; she dancing naked in front of a window; and the couple together at the table, on the sofa, by the sea. Christoph Radl, the exhibition’s art director, comments: “Before Instagram feeds, before TikTok live streams, before our collective urge to share our private lives publicly, Ettore and Barbara were already documenting their lives.” However, the point is that these photos remained hidden for nearly twenty years. Indeed, there is “no mask, no care, no audience in mind. Only the astonishing courage of two people willing to see themselves and be seen.”
Radl tells Domus that he decided to use smaller formats for these more intimate images as a way of preserving the subjects from spectacle.

“I wish something would stick somewhere! I’d like to capture something, even just a trace, a sparkle... of that golden dust that is life...!” According to Barbara Radice, this is how her husband explained his obsession with photography. The intention of this exhibition, for which a photographic book has also been produced, is exactly that: to immortalise those moments that Sottsass had chosen to treasure.

Opening image: Milan, 1977