In Oasi Zegna, even the mountains are human-made

He wanted to make the finest fabrics in the world, and from Trivero — a small town in Piedmont — he travelled all the way to New York to do it. Today, his surname identifies one of Italy’s largest protected mountain landscapes, while his wool mill remains at the center of one of the country’s most enduring experiments in the relationship between industrial welfare and territory. We are talking about Ermenegildo Zegna, the Piedmontese industrialist who founded the wool mill in 1910 that would eventually become one of Italy’s leading luxury menswear groups. His Oasi, spread across the Biella Alps around Trivero, now covers more than 100 square kilometers — roughly the size of 14,000 football fields — made up of forests, hiking trails, panoramic roads, gardens, artworks and architectural interventions woven into the landscape.

Alongside permanent works by Dan Graham, Liliana Moro, Daniel Buren and Roman Signer, the site now hosts a new exhibition by Chiara Camoni, the artist selected for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026, whose sponsor is also Zegna.

Hosted inside Casa Zegna and open until November 22, 2026, “Luccicanza. Di fiori e di filo, di pietra e di terra, di pelle e di radice”, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, unfolds throughout the Zegna family villa — especially in the Winter Garden, the open, water-filled space that once housed the greenhouse — and inside the Church of San Rocco, a small roadside chapel recently restored and returned to the local community. For this exhibition, Camoni worked almost like a gatherer of the mountain landscape. The Winter Garden is filled with ceramic bowls and vessels, reclining figures that seem to emerge directly from the earth, woven carpets made with yarns from the wool mill, and lightweight curtains printed with leaves and flowers collected throughout the Oasi.

Chiara Camoni

Conceived like a domestic interior, the installation recalls the artist’s earlier exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, arranging tapestries, canvases and sculptures inside a luminous room where the surrounding landscape continuously enters through the glass walls. Inside the chapel returns Senza titolo, Stabkarte, a 2014 work commissioned by ZegnArt — the contemporary art program founded by the group in 2012 — while all the works installed in the greenhouse are site-specific, conceived and produced while preparations for the Venice Biennale were already underway.

Each object exists within that ambiguous threshold “between where sculpture ends and where the object begins,” Camoni tells Domus while describing her artistic practice. She refers to those moments when, alone at home in the morning, ordinary objects suddenly seem to come alive. “That,” she says poetically, “is the generosity of the world revealing itself.”

In Chiara Camoni’s work, reality rarely enters directly — at least not in the way contemporary art often expects it to. “My contemporary world is dreams,” she says when asked how her practice relates to current events. Yet even if climate change and the relationship with the mountains never explicitly appear in the works of “Luccicanza”, one element inevitably brings them back into focus — perhaps even more powerfully — and that is matter itself. Every work in the exhibition contains fragments of the territory’s geological and social history: ash from summer bonfires in the Rhododendron Basin, sand from the Sessera stream, plant fibers, minerals and the black soil of ancient charcoal pits where local workers once guarded fires for seven days and seven nights in the forest.

As a result, color is never truly “added” to the works. Botanical curtains absorb the imprint of leaves, flowers and natural juices directly onto their surfaces; ceramics change tone according to how minerals react under high temperatures; ash gradually blackens the materials over time. Even the title of the project originates from the shimmering quality — the luccicanza — of the local mica schist, a metamorphic stone typical of the Trivero landscape that reflects light through the mica embedded in its composition. In the Val Sessera basin, within the Oasi Zegna, this rock — formed only under extreme heat and pressure — still marks the point where the African and European continents collided millions of years ago, giving rise to the Alps.

If reality does not fully enter the artist’s works, something else continues to move beneath the surface. “I love tradition, but I cannot ignore that the materials of our landscape are no longer only natural ones — they are also materials shaped by human intervention,” Camoni admits. She recalls how her daughter first made her realize this while they were collecting shells on the beach: the child saw no distinction between seashells and the pieces of plastic washed ashore.

The same idea repeatedly emerges while visiting the Zegna project. “Mountain management should not be seen as something negative,” explains Marco Passerini, forestry specialist for the Oasi. “On the contrary, managing the mountains becomes even more necessary in the age of climate change, landslides and water scarcity.” The wool mill’s many reforestation projects reflect this approach: first those promoted by Ermenegildo Zegna himself, and later Zegna Forest, which replanted 60,000 trees in 2020, also helping to protect local water resources.

In other words, the protection of the mountain now depends on human intervention almost as much as its destruction does. That is precisely why Casa Zegna becomes the ideal setting for Camoni’s work, a practice that over the years has increasingly dissolved the boundary between nature and culture. For the artist, materials are no longer neutral tools but active interlocutors. And the same is true for the Oasi itself. Newly created artificial lakes supply water to the wool mill while also helping prevent wildfires, while the Rhododendron Basin — planted by Ermenegildo Zegna in the 1930s — continues to transform the landscape into a living organism, constantly reshaped over time.

Swimming pools, social care centers, workers’ housing, churches, hiking paths, hotels and ski slopes: Ermenegildo Zegna’s dream was to bring prosperity back to a mountain region impoverished by deforestation and abandonment. More than anything, he wanted to extend the same idea of quality he pursued in his fabrics into everyday life itself: a quality of labor, landscape and even leisure. The story inevitably recalls the Olivetti experience in Ivrea and other Italian industrial villages such as Crespi d'Adda. Yet compared to those examples, the Zegna project is one of the few that has continued to evolve over time — largely because it has constantly questioned and reinvented itself.

This is visible in the artistic projects scattered throughout the Oasi: from Daniel Buren, who explored the almost alien relationship many residents of Trivero had with the factory, to Roman Signer, who transformed the rigid rhythm of industrial labor into a public sculpture made of rhythmic bursts of steam, simultaneously evoking production, fatigue and pollution. The same spirit emerges inside the factory itself, where the interiors resemble a modernist museum and ultra-thin glass walls separate the founder’s office and the design studios from the machinery floor, with remarkably few visual hierarchies.

If Adriano Olivetti built a modern city around the factory, inviting architects, urban planners and intellectuals to imagine new ways of living and working, Zegna pursued something different: instead of designing a city, he designed a landscape — and a new way of inhabiting the mountains — stretching from the factory on Via Roma all the way to the Alps. And it is precisely within this landscape that Chiara Camoni’s work finds its most natural context: not an untouched or nostalgic nature, but rather a “city far from the city,” continuously reshaped by human presence, where even the mountain itself has ultimately become a collective construction.