When stones sing & paint: Antolini invites Bang & Olufsen and Murran Billi for Milan Design Week

Have you ever wondered if stones can hear? Not in the way we understand sound, but in the way they store memory—layered, veined, fractured, yet whole. Imagine leaning close to a slice of natural quartz or fossilized wood and finding yourself immersed in a world of silent frequencies. As if the ancient pressure that shaped them left behind an echo, waiting to be felt rather than heard. During Milan Design Week 2025, Antolini and Bang & Olufsen invite you into an exhibition that asks you not to look, but to listen and feel.

Stepping into the Antolini MilanoDuomo Stoneroom is like crossing a threshold from the everyday into something almost sacred. A few steps in, conversations drop to a whisper. The air shifts—cooler, denser. You notice visitors pausing, their bodies slowing as if in reverence. Someone reaches out to touch a stone surface, then pulls their hand back, unsure if it’s allowed. A child crouches to peer into the illuminated veins of a natural quartz panel, captivated. And all around, a quiet resonance seems to hum beneath the silence—felt in the soles of your feet more than heard in your ears. Light refracts through translucent materials, gliding across natural quartz veins that catch and bend time itself. With each shift in light and footstep, the room subtly changes character. The walls breathe. Sound and stone respond to each other. It’s not just display; it’s choreography. Here, Italian tradition and Danish innovation converse.

The Beosound Balance Natura speaker makes this dialogue tangible. Developed through a meticulous partnership between Antolini and Bang & Olufsen, it blends craftsmanship and acoustic precision in a singular sculptural object. The pedestal, hewn from stones like Cristallo Iceberg, Cristallo Vitrum ‘Wow’, and Retro Grey, Retro Brown, and Retro Fancyblack Fossilized Wood, reveals its own ancient narratives. Veins shimmer like submerged rivers. Textures seem in motion, despite being still for thousands of years.

“We have transformed materials into emotion,” says Kristian Teär, CEO of Bang & Olufsen. Indeed, the speaker doesn’t sit on the pedestal—it rises from it. A brushed aluminium ring separates and connects at once, grounding the speaker while elevating the experience. You don’t just hear music—you feel its weight in stone. 

Close your eyes for a moment. Can you hear the forests locked inside petrified wood? The crystalline stillness inside a natural quartz vein?

Bang & Olufsen’s presence culminates in a limited edition series: 16 Beosound Balance Natura speakers, each a one-of-a-kind combination of material and tone. A Beovision Theatre 55″ TV and Beolab 28 speakers in Amazonite quartzite add further dimension—cool, vibrant, unmistakably tactile.

On the other side of the room, an equally captivating chapter of Antolini’s Milan presence—this time, in dialogue with the visual language of Florence-based artist Murran Billi. In this exhibition, stone becomes subject, canvas, and collaborator—revealing portraits not imposed, but invited to the surface. Billi’s approach is less about control than connection, trusting the stone to speak first.

Here, the story takes a more human and historical turn. Artist Murran Billi’s installation, “Beyond Stone,” brings four de’ Medici women to life from the mineral depths of Antolini’s slabs. Working in mixed media on surfaces like Onice Bianco “Extra” and Cristallo Rosa “Wow,” Billi doesn’t so much paint as uncover. The figures seem found, not made—faces coaxed from history, not invented.

There is Lucrezia Tornabuoni, poised and commanding; Clarice Orsini, quiet strength in her eyes. Lucrezia di Lorenzo de’ Medici appears in thought, while Clarice de’ Medici stands like a guardian, her niece Catherine’s destiny already echoing in her shadow.

“Every stone already holds a story,” Billi says. But he’s no mystic—he’s a visual translator. His work reads the surface with reverence and renders the hidden visible. You can almost see the moment where brush meets mineral, where intent meets accident.

Rather than blending stone and sound, the collaborations reveal their shared essence. Both are about resonance, memory and presence. They hold time. They shape silence. This is less an exhibition than a spatial composition—a place where sound and history ring. Antolini, founded in 1956, brings expertise drawn from over 1,300 natural stones and global artisanship. Bang & Olufsen, with nearly a century of acoustic innovation, brings technical rigor and sensuous precision. And Murran Billi lends the project a human yet visual voice: grounded, intuitive, unafraid of the invisible.

So, can stones hear? Perhaps not. But maybe, just maybe, they’ve been listening longer than we have. And can stones paint? Not by themselves—but through the hands and eyes of Murran Billi, their surfaces have become portraits, their silence shaped into expression. In this room, for a moment, we are the quiet ones—witnessing more than watching.