For the 2025 edition of Fuorisalone, the Porta Venezia Design District presents No Boundaries Design. To Create, one must first question everything. In an age when the boundary between physical and digital reality is dissolving, when the boundaries between art, science, technology and nature are constantly renegotiating, design is an act of radical questioning, a field of tension between what exists and what could exist. No Boundaries Design is not just a theme, but a manifesto: to create, one must first question everything.
NO BOUNDARIES DESIGN: THE NEW CONCEPT OF PORTA VENEZIA DESIGN DISTRICT
Inspired by the visionary legacy of Eileen Gray, a pioneer of modernism and an erratic figure on the design and architecture scene, this year's concept is a detonator of new expressive possibilities. Just as Gray rejected clear-cut categorizations between art, design, and architecture, No Boundaries Design breaks down disciplinary barriers to redefine the role of the contemporary designer: no longer a mere performer of functions, but an activator of questions, a builder of narratives, an explorer of hybrid spaces.
In a context dominated by formal conventions and established paradigms, the Porta Venezia district develops as a diffuse immersive path, in which the language of design becomes a tool for deconstruction, re-signification, and cultural and social exploration. Through innovative installations, materials and processes, the exhibition narrative translates Gray's thinking into experience: the object is never static, the space is never definitive, the user is never passive.
DESIGN AS A GESTURE OF RESEARCH, A CRITICAL ACT, AN EXERCISE IN POSSIBILITY
The works on display challenge the idea of boundaries, between interior and exterior, between functional and poetic, between memory and future, and take the form of visual and tactile interrogations, capable of stimulating new ways of interaction and perception. Design, therefore, frees itself from all dogmatic constraints to become a gesture of research, a critical act, an exercise in possibility. The Porta Venezia Design District proposes itself as a laboratory of ideas in perpetual movement, an open ground for experimentation, where the concept of limit dissolves to leave room for possibility, questioning, discovery: to create means, first and foremost, to question. Only by breaking down the boundaries of thought is it possible to redefine the meaning of doing design today.
PRIMA ASSICURAZIONI AND TOILETPAPER
In a virtuous dialogue between renewal, transformation and design, Prima Assicurazioni, the tech company that has revolutionized the Italian insurance industry through technology and digital, chooses to dress Porta Venezia Design District as Main Partner for the 2025 edition of Milan Design Week, collaborating with the visionary creative studio Toiletpaper, founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. The artistic intervention will reinterpret urban spaces through the recognizable and impactful visual language of Toiletpaper's iconic snakes to represent the tale of a fast and dynamic reality that “changes skin” but remains consistent with itself. Just like Milan's urban spaces and like Prima itself, which in ten years of activity has been able to rapidly impose itself in a traditional market such as the insurance one, with more than 4 million active customers, without ever losing the innovative charge that has always characterized its technological DNA. Moreover, in an age in which experimentation and contamination become sap for new visions, technology is not only the engine of the future, but also that one thing destined to permeate all people's activities, an element, indeed, that knows no “boundaries”.
“The snake pattern envelops the Porta Venezia district as a pulsing symbol of metamorphosis, a flow of energy in constant evolution," commented Pierpaolo Ferrari, founder of Toiletpaper. "We were fascinated by the synergy created with the district and the confrontation with a reality such as Prima, outside our usual field of action until now. And this is precisely the strength of design and creativity: the ability to dissolve boundaries, weave unexpected connections and transform each encounter into an unprecedented visual and conceptual tale.” -
