Rediscovering Alchimia, the collective that changed Italian design forever

Although rarely remembered today, 1976 was a year of enormous significance in Italy. It was the year the Communist Party soared in the elections and moved closer to government through the historic compromise, but also the year when the first consequences of that compromise began to emerge: the rise of armed groups and escalating political violence. It was a moment when Kantian rationality—the idea that what is rational is real—seemed to have reached its peak. Seemed.

This climate of heavy rationality, however, generated tensions, opposition, and a thirst for critique. It was in this context that the search for a “weak” form of thought, an alternative to the strong narratives of the era, began to take shape. It is no coincidence that this was the year Adriana and Alessandro Guerriero founded Alchimia—a hybrid entity between laboratory and small enterprise, a true collective that for more than 15 years brought together the most significant figures of the Italian scene around the freedom to create—or rather, to critique design through creation.

Objects, architecture, performances, fashion, sound, video, theater, editorial products: nothing escaped Alchimia’s investigation, in search of a new definition of production in the wake of the anti-productivism of radical design. By placing a “carpet-raft” that gathers objects and graphics in the middle of the ADI Design Museum, Guerriero brings to Milan—until January 2026—the exhibition "Alchimia. The Revolution of Italian Design", curated by François Burkhardt and Tobias Hoffmann, arriving from Berlin’s Bröhan-Museum. “The goals of Alchimia could be summed up today as a commitment to aesthetics in the visual imagination,” Guerriero explains. “Our moral stance has always been that of those who believe that aesthetic work plays a crucial role in human survival.”

Alessandro Guerriero

Experiment after experiment, the exhibition evokes the stories—and above all the people—who marked pivotal shifts in design. This is “neo-modern” design, as one might call it, rather than postmodern. Many episodes of the Mobile Infinito, an object-performance begun in 1981, are presented—“which annihilates, by excess, both typologies and the designers’ signatures themselves, entering into experimentation with the Magazzini criminali,” says Guerriero. The Arredo Vestitivo for Fiorucci is included, as well as pieces by Sottsass that recall his involvement with Alchimia and simultaneously foreshadow the split that led to the creation of Memphis, explicitly oriented toward industry and the market. Cinzia Ruggeri’s work, which would push the fragile boundaries of fashion, is on display, alongside Ollo’s forms spanning graphics, fabrics, surfaces, and jewelry.

The exhibition also highlights the many evocative projects of Alessandro Mendini and Domus’s presence. Here, Domus appears in two ways: curatorial, through Burkhardt—who directed the magazine in the 1990s—and through Mendini, who, during his tenure, involved a figure closely linked to Alchimia, Occhiomagico, in a now-legendary series of covers. Occhiomagico also stars in the small cube-wunderkammer dedicated to graphic works, which concludes the long “carpet.”

Two other episodes of Alchimia, “with a strong Mendini influence,” illustrate the meaning of this complex, collaborative story. One is the redesign of the Bau.Haus series, where design icons are reinterpreted, re-decorated, or decorated for the first time—“a reflection linked to the new era of electronics and chips,” as Burkhardt explains. “Once the material dimension of the product is partially dissolved, only decoration and symbol can reveal the content of form and function, even though no object is exhausted by the function it carries.” 

Finally, there is architecture: the Groningen Museum, conceived within Alchimia and later developed after the laboratory’s closure by Mendini with Starck and Coop Himmelb(l)au. In the early 1990s, there was also a separate idea for an Alchimia Museum, which Guerriero saw as the culmination of the collective experience. A generation was shown that creation was possible, regardless of the tyranny of marketing. As the curators note, presenting that same possibility today—when tyranny is thriving and shaping everything—is what gives this exhibition its sense and urgency.

All images: Courtesy Adi Design Museum