Before the Light: an exhibition in celebration of prototypes
What happens to a studio’s unchosen prototypes? Mayice decided to unveil the hidden parts of their design process, putting them on show for Forma at the Ateneo de Madrid.
There is a moment in every design process that never makes it to the showroom floor, just before an object becomes what it will be. Prototypes make up the vast majority of a designer’s work, but are rarely seen by the public. Mayice, a Madrid-based studio founded by Marta Alonso Yebra and Imanol Calderón Elósegui, chose to make prototypes the subject of their first solo exhibition.
Before the Light, presented at the Ateneo de Madrid during Forma, part of Madrid Design Festival, in March 2026, was an act of unusual sincerity: a studio turning its own working process inside out and placing it on view. Gathering this accumulated body of work, it asks us to consider what is lost when a design never makes it to production.
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The exhibition is structured around a blunt acknowledgement: some of these pieces will never be made again. Their complexity, their dimensions, or their cost place them beyond the economics of mass production. In this sense, Before the Light belongs to a movement of art design galleries which elevate the prototype, not as a failed precursor but as an object complete in and of itself, whose difficulty of replication is part of what makes it interesting and worth examining.
With a sharp focus on materials, each design by the duo is presented with its own inherent personality and aims to reflect what they call the soul of a material. For example, the Filamento light is a sculptural piece made from a single length of curved glass, a study of how light travels through concave and convex forms. When illuminated, the effect is a laser-like filament of light that extends from one end of the lamp to the other. Lit and unlit, it tells a different story about what glass can do.
Among the works presented in the exhibition, El Deseo is a wall lamp hidden behind the last wall of the exhibition space, but it stands apart from the rest as the studio’s newest entry. The piece stems from a conversation with Pedro Almodóvar, as the film director had fallen in love with the studio’s work years ago, even featuring one of their lamps in his movies. Over a long discussion about lighting, Pedro suggested something specific: a wall lamp with indirect light.
Promptly named after his production company, El Deseo is notable for its elegant simplicity. It requires just a single hanging point on the wall, like a picture frame, and two glass pieces are pressure-fitted together, making the light source entirely accessible and replaceable with no tools and no disruption to the wall. In Madrid, the piece was presented in a neutral colour, but it is available in any shade variation.
For Marta and Imanol, the exhibition was a journey through their design processes: the people, entities, and brands that accompanied them in each work, all of whom helped move ideas from sketches into reality, constructing objects with history and emotion. Before the Light made these processes concrete and clear, showing visitors what is usually invisible in design.
