“Don’t call me collectible!”: exploring furniture as a research object
How Vestigia turned a Tuscan villa into a temporary ecosystem where design is an object of research which generstes cultural value and discourse.
An exasperating trend has settled over the design world in the last decade, and it is collectible design. What began as a useful way to talk about objects that didn’t fit neatly into art or industry has hardened into a marketing category. Vestigia, the design exhibition held at the recently renovated Villa Marie in Tuscany running from 5 July to 26 September 2026, opens with a statement of intent – “Don’t call me collectible!” – aimed at saving the object from a definition its curation considers too limited, insisting instead on maintaining research and value.
Funded by Jonathan Bocca in 2025, who is also its Creative Director, together with Costantino Gucci, Vestigia’s first edition was curated under the theme “Design in a real world,” contrasting frenetic urban life and industrial design with a slower, local, artisanal approach. For 2026, the curation is led by Cosimo Bonciani, founder of Bunker Studio and Bunker Galleria, with a focus on research design that presents objects as traces of processes, questions and experiments.
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Vestigia: Don’t call me collectible!
Research design
Collectible design is the term the market has settled on for objects that sit between furniture and sculpture: too conceptual or complex to be mass-produced, but still functional enough to not be sold purely as art. Over the last few years, the term has calcified into a genre with its own trade fairs, its own collectors and aesthetics. Vestigia’s objection isn’t to any of those things individually, but to letting scarcity and craftsmanship stand in for meaning. An object doesn’t earn its place by being rare or expensive, but by showing care and research.
The substitute the show proposes is “research design,” aiming to reframe the object not just as a finished product but also as a visible trace of a process, a question, an experiment. It asks a kind of honesty about both the designer’s creative process and the manufacturing methods used to create the object, inviting the viewer to understand and evaluate transparently what they are looking at.
The philosophy is inseparable from where the show happens, in Tuscany, a place where art and architecture have been intertwined for centuries between Renaissance towns and marble quarries. The works are installed outdoors in the garden of Villa Marie, refusing the shelter of the white cube. The show featured 25 exhibitors, ranging from local Tuscan designers and companies such as marble producer Acquasanta Edizioni with Francesco Maria Messina, artist and designer Duccio Maria Gambi, to internationally recognised figures like Laurids Gallée, Movimento Gallery and Jacob Egeberg. Here is a selection of six exemplary projects that were on show.
Altera by Costantino Gucci
Altera is the piece that greets visitors most directly, since it stands in the middle of the villa’s lake and works in symbiosis with the water. Designed by Costantino Gucci, it is an object between a mirror and a sculpture. It is a mirrored monolith composed of two inclined planes that fracture the continuity of perspective, creating a different landscape by reflecting the surrounding elements outward. The observer can never see themselves in the centre, but is deliberately kept peripheral, making the landscape the key subject.
The concern about reflection runs through Costantino Gucci’s practice more broadly, who treats mirror and glass as unstable, living surfaces that respond to light and to the bodies moving in front of them. His solo work was recently exhibited at Movimento Gallery, and has explored how reflective surfaces can break and multiply an image instead of returning it plainly.
Silenti by Jonathan Bocca in collaboration with OMBRE-1
Silenti is a site-specific installation of illuminated, anthropomorphic sculptures made to be experienced through movement, by walking beneath the objects and understanding their different perspectives. The material is Geolite, a high-performance mineral-based composite chosen for a durable and tactile stone-like surface. Bocca’s sculptures don’t just decorate the landscape; they interrupt the visitor’s path and redefine how their surroundings are perceived, encouraging a slower, more physical mode of encounter that is very much in step with Vestigia’s larger argument against purely visual design.
Trained at IED Florence with a period at Fabrica’s research centre in Treviso, Bocca has built his reputation on transforming industrial paper waste from his hometown’s paper mills into dense, durable sculptural composites, treating recycled matter as a way of giving discarded material a second, more permanent life. Silenti carries that same instinct for turning process-driven material choices into figures that seem like living creatures.
Stygian prototypes by Tommaso Pardini
The series is a display of “UFOs,” Unfunctional Fictional Objects by Tommaso Pardini, which take the show’s ecological undercurrent and push it towards something darker and stranger. They are carved from upcycled styrofoam blocks that used to be display structures at Fuorisalone 2026, and are meant to evoke an oil spill, monolithic bodies that resemble industrial relics or fossils.
Set against Villa Marie’s clean and fairytale-like background, the prototypes read like alien specimens from an excavation, autonomous bodies that reflect, in Pardini’s own words, a dark present rather than an aspirational one.
Daria Bench by Bunker Studio
The piece is built from 14 modules, each 45 by 45 cm, in Pietra Serena, the grey sandstone that has shaped Florence’s streets and facades for centuries. Each module functions as a unit that can be repeated and rearranged, making Bunker Studio‘s bench a modular system that generates visual rhythm through the alternation of solids, voids, and materials rather than a single continuous form.
The project represents the meeting between two Tuscan traditions. Pietra Serena stands in for the region’s architectural heritage, while the foam elements refer to the upholstery traditions of Quarrata. Brass is used as the connective tissue between them, as a symbol of the relationship between the two crafts.
B-fora by IAMMI
Cast in bronze, the vase takes the classical amphora and shows what centuries of art history have kept turned away: the “b-side” of the traditional object. The piece, commissioned by Villa Marie, fuses the statuesque proportions of Greek figures with the silhouette of a contemporary female body, presenting overtly and without the draping that usually concealed it under the pretext of decorum.
Bronze is treated through an oxidation process in which acids react with the metal to produce a shifting and unpredictable pattern of gold and shadow tones across the surface, which IAMMI calls a “living finish” that functions almost like ageing skin.
Medusa collection by Etereo
The Medusa collection, designed by the Dubai and Milan based studio Etereo for the stone specialist Alimonti, closes the selection on a poetic tension between the lightness of drapery and the density of stone. Rigid marble slabs are treated as if they were fluid fabric, folded and torqued into an organic, vertical rhythm. The collection spans floor lamps of varying heights, a table lamp and a console, developing the technique across different scales and functions.
Structural lines of bronzed aluminium run through the pieces, intersecting the marble’s folds and revealing an internal sense of movement. The collection questions what materials are meant to do versus what they can do, possibly claiming that nothing is really as it seems.
