Slalom will take part in BAM Open Air Design with Ecotonos, a site-specific installation that brings together the brands’s expertise in acoustics and the design vision of UNA/UNLESS, invited by Slalom to create a work that explores the dialogue between architecture, nature, and sensory perception.
Now in its fifth edition, the outdoor design event — conceived by COIMA Image and curated with MoscaPartners as part of the Riccardo Catella Foundation’s cultural program — will present the theme “Frames of Nature”, a concept inspired by the language of cinema.
The event investigates how nature and culture can intersect, offering the public a unique and inclusive outdoor experience. For Slalom and UNA/UNLESS, it is a valuable opportunity to realize an acoustic installation that underscores the value of silence and listening as acts of resistance, as seeds for new futures and opportunities to re-entangle with nature.
Designed by architect Giulia Foscari, founder of UNA/UNLESS, the installation is located within the lawn of the Biblioteca degli Alberi, at the green heart of Porta Nuova district. This collection of natural pavilions is dedicated to companies participating in Open Air Design and conceived in direct dialogue with the landscape. The installation was born as a poetic and conceptual extension of the Voice of Commons project, presented by UNA/UNLESS as a Special Project of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
In the heart of the park, a fractured prism emerges as a threshold between two worlds: the city and nature. More than an installation, it is a device that reflects, protects, and listens — an active boundary between the urban sphere that consumes and the biodiversity that resists.
Ecotonos takes its name from ecology, where the term describes transition zones between ecosystems: living, unstable borders dense with diversity. Here it becomes a sensitive threshold that shields nature from the city’s noise, offering the chance to reconnect with the nature and to rediscover silence as a condition for listening.
Toward the city, its diamond-like surface is sharp and reflective, dematerializing urban volumes into ghostly mirages — as though the city could only recognize itself from the outside, or rather, reflected in a surface that rejects it. The Spikes act as tools of ecological defense: warnings, invitations to metamorphosis.
On the park-facing side, the installation opens up. It welcomes. It softens mechanical noise to allow the breathing of bees, the singing of birds, the rustling of leaves to emerge. Its interior, sculpted with regular cavities, recalls a honeycomb: a living, modular geometry that both hosts and protects. It designs a intimate space, where nature is not a backdrop but protagonist. The “cells” invite participation, with plug-in elements designed to host life: seeds, microhabitats and water stations for birds and bees — an interspecies refuge, a micro-sanctuary for biodiversity.
This dual orientation — city on one side, nature on the other — is an architectural expression of the tensions that define our age: extraction versus care, blind growth versus radical listening. As in Joseph Beuys’s vision, here “defending nature” does not mean isolating it, but forging sensitive alliances with what transcends us.
The installation is part of a larger project: a material echo of Voice of Commons, the Special Project of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale conceived by Giulia Foscari, UNA/UNLESS.
In Voice of Commons, Carlo Scarpa’s Biennale’s restored ticket office is transformed into a Planetary Embassy for the Global Commons — the Ocean, the Atmosphere, Antarctica, and Outer Space — and for all forms of life that depend on them. Conceived as a radio station for both human and non-human voices, the Planetary Embassy was acoustically isolated using the Spikes developed with Slalom as experimental acoustic surfaces inspired by space technology.
Here at BAM, the Spikes return — evolved. They signal a new step: the birth of a new line of sustainable products, developed by UNA in collaboration with Slalom, reimagining sound-absorbing forms — historically made of expanded polyurethane, a petroleum derivative — using recycled, regenerated, or natural materials.
This installation is not merely a formal threshold, but a political one: between the realm of the artificial and the rights of living beings; between logics of extraction and logics of care. Through this poetic yet armed gesture, silence and listening, become acts of resistance and foundation. A space of respite, and seed for new futures.
Cinema becomes the guiding thread of “Frames of Nature,” a theme chosen for its extraordinary ability to attract and engage through narrative content and immersive installations. A universal, evocative, and immediate language that enables the construction of powerful imaginaries and fosters an emotional connection with the audience.
In the design thinking of Slalom and UNA/UNLESS, cinematic references intertwine, becoming evocative and visual traces. In this light, Ecotonos finds an unexpected echo in Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog. In the iconoclastic geography of Antarctica, where absolute silence reigns, the film reveals how this very condition allows one to attune to nature: a silence in which the cracking of ice becomes a deep breath, the distant exhale of whales is perceptible, and the solitary flight of an albatross across the white horizon is almost tangible. In the same way, the installation aspires to suspend urban noise in order to draw attention to what usually remains unseen or unheard, transforming silence into a tool for deep listening and renewed interspecies connection.
From September 18 to 21, the Open Air Design installations also served as the starting point for a series of public talks, conceived as moments of exchange between disciplines, visions, and sensibilities.
The talk program was moderated by Francesca Molteni, curator, director, and author of films and documentaries. In 2009, she founded Muse Factory of Projects, a platform that fosters dialogue between creativity, culture, and business. For the past five years, she has collaborated with BAM in shaping the direction of Open Air Design.
The program, which involved designers, actors, curators, musicians, and representatives of the companies participating in the project, offered a diverse lineup of voices from across the city.
During the opening talk on September 18, Giulia Foscari was joined in conversation by other prominent figures from the cultural and creative landscape — including Rosita Celentano, Giampiero Judica, and Patrizia Sardo Marras, to name a few — along with Alida Catella, CEO of Coima Image and Vice President of the Fondazione Riccardo Catella, and Caterina Mosca, CEO of Mosca Partners.
The day of September 19, which featured architect Michele De Lucchi among its key speakers, offered an opportunity to delve into the design vision of the companies involved — including Slalom — and to explore the increasingly urgent relationship between nature, public space, and urban imagination.
