They make lighting design sound: why everyone is talking about Anonima Luci

“We were working in two very traditional lighting design studios. When we met, we realised we had an opportunity — so we left.” This is how Alberto Saggia and Stefania Kalogeropoulos describe the birth of Anonima Luci. After meeting in 2018, they launched what has become one of the most compelling Italian lighting design studios of recent years.

From their first luminous scenographies for the Macao parties — the self-managed and occupied space that marked one of the most electrifying experiences of Milan’s 2010s — to projects for independent galleries, and later immersive installations for Milan Design Week and international brands, Saggia and Kalogeropoulos developed a vocabulary that weaves together light, architecture, art and colour. Their work now moves across cultural institutions, historic palaces and music festivals, ranging from temporary interventions to permanent installations.

Anonima Luci

Their most recent project features in Milano City Echoes, a new Milanese branch of the Polifonic festival, which explores how music can expand towards light, visual arts and architecture. From 20 to 23 November, talks, workshops and performances outline a sonic identity for the city. The studio gave a lecture at the ADI Design Museum, where Domus met them.

At the core of Anonima Luci’s work is the dialogue between light and sound — a relationship born almost instinctively. Kalogeropoulos DJed in the Milanese scene, developing a rhythmic sensitivity that would become central to the duo’s practice, a kind of “visual translation of what we listen to.”

Macao, the most controversial occupied space of Milan’s 2010s — closed in 2021 — became their first testing ground. They worked on lighting for the parties with the idea that “innovations and languages emerge from subcultures.”
In 2019, they created Neuroscopia: thirty green lasers forming an imaginary grid across the two floors of the Liberty-style hall, distorting perceptions of height and depth. “Macao was a key experience,” they recall, “the one that allowed us to find our direction.”

In 2021, for their first solo show in the church of Borgo delle Colonne in Parma, they introduced movement and modularity to what had previously been static installations. During the opening of 444 Linee, tiny LEDs and monodirectional lasers were synchronised with a twenty-minute sample created with Katatonic Silentio.
“Sound is a narrative element,” they explain, “it’s like redrawing with music something that doesn’t exist.” This principle has since become their signature, visible in the modular installations presented at C2C, Terraforma and various electronic and experimental festivals.

Their approach is rooted in meticulous, almost analogue technical work with a strong DIY spirit. Anonima Luci does not use standard components — instead, they design their own circuits and supports.
“We don’t work with products already on the market… the kind of programming we do is much closer to writing.” “In spaces, we work with architectural matrices: we take single light points, attach small lasers, 3D-print the joints.” These are ultra-light elements, invisible when the installation is off.
“Technology must serve us, not the other way around,” they say.

At the 2023 edition of C2C, this minimal technology translated into kilometres of hidden cabling. “They’re always the same minimal components,” they say, “but when you scale them up, you end up working with four kilometres of cable.”

Anonima Luci

Their three-year collaboration with the festival culminated in 555 nm: an inverted cone of light suspended at the centre of the space, whose shape morphs in response to the music."We wanted the light to breathe with the music,” they say. “Not a visual, but a physical presence moving like a body.” The central laser axis becomes a “visual heartbeat.” “It’s a work of writing: nothing is automatic.”

Their latest museum project took them to the Triennale Milano, inside Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo dell’Arte. The goal for Voce was to create a modular platform capable of hosting performances, DJ sets and bands, in dialogue with Giorgio Di Salvo’s sound system.

The hall, divided into five bays by colonnades, was rethought through the installation of more than 25,000 individually programmable light points, allowing Voce to be “broken apart” into sectors and to generate complex gradients.“With this software you can fade a LED from blue to white by distributing gradients across the different ceilings,” they explain, citing Dan Flavin as a reference. The platform is based on a proprietary software with an interface developed by a computer engineer. “We selected modifiable presets that allow you to do a lot of things,” they say, although the full potential has yet to be explored.

Alongside their work for clubs, Anonima Luci explores urban and open-air interventions. Among these is the gradient pathway created for Terraforma 2022 in the park of Villa Arconati: a monumental garden transformed into a meditative gateway to the festival.

“We’ve always loved the gradients of sunset and sunrise. And the effect of all the different windows in buildings — those warm and cold colours that look like the sky. That’s the effect we search for in colour.”