The Anti-Object Studio: How Formafantasma Made Research the Real Design Work

The Studio That Designs Questions, Not Just Objects

Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin founded Formafantasma in 2009, and for most of the following decade the design world filed them under a familiar heading: two Italians in the Netherlands making beautifully strange objects from lava stone, bioplastics and animal by-products. In 2026 that filing is finally obsolete. Monocle named the pair its Designers of the Year, and in July the Serpentine Galleries in London appointed them the first-ever Lead R&D Fellows in Ecology in the institution's history. Neither honour was handed out for a chair. Both recognise something rarer: a practice that has quietly redefined what the verb to design can even point at.

Working between studios in Milan and Rotterdam, Formafantasma treats research as the primary medium and the object as an occasional, almost incidental, output. Their subject is not the thing on the shelf but the tangled system that put it there: the forest, the flock, the mine, the law, the ledger.

Cambio: When Wood Became a Legal Problem

The clearest statement of that method arrived in 2020 with Cambio, a Serpentine commission that turned a gallery into a reading room about the global timber industry. Instead of finished furniture, visitors found eighteen months of collected evidence: interviews with foresters, scientists and lawyers, satellite imagery, samples, and a companion website holding all the source material.

The argument was uncomfortable. Timber, the material designers reach for when they want to feel virtuous, is governed by a trade so vast and so old that it resists regulation. Formafantasma traced its roots to nineteenth-century colonial bioprospecting and followed it to a present in which wood is one of the planet's largest industries by both revenue and biospheric impact. As the studio put it, Cambio was an attempt to expand the understanding of what design can be, so that forestry techniques and timber legislation themselves become tools for designing a better future for forests. The show refused the reassuring image of the certified, sustainably sourced plank and asked designers to look instead at governance.

Oltre Terra: 11,000 Years of Sheep

If Cambio dissected an industry, Oltre Terra dissected a relationship. First shown at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo in 2023 and still travelling as an evolving project, its subject is wool, but its real subject is the co-evolution of humans and sheep. The title comes from the etymology of transhumance: the Latin trans, meaning across or beyond, and humus, meaning ground.

The narrative begins roughly 11,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers stopped killing wild flocks outright and began instead to track and manage them, the start of a domestication so total that most modern sheep can no longer shed their fleece without human shearing. Formafantasma laid this out with the tools of a curator-anthropologist: life-size sheep of six breeds carved and painted by hand, a 1,700-year-old woollen tunic recovered from a melting Norwegian ice patch, archival films and shears, and poetic captions written by the philosopher Emanuele Coccia. At the centre lay a large cream carpet woven from the wool of twelve Italian breeds whose fleece is normally discarded as worthless, produced with the manufacturer cc-Tapis. The point was blunt: a material we treat as renewable and benign carries its own history of extraction, breeding and waste.

The Objects Still Matter

None of this means Formafantasma has abandoned the shelf. Their lamps for Flos, WireRing in 2018, WireLine in 2021 and SuperWire in 2024, are among the most quietly influential lighting objects of the era, each built from the humblest premise: expose the power cable and the LED rather than hiding them. The studio argues that the human relationship with light is never merely functional but emotional, and that quality cannot be measured in brightness alone; their lamps are designed to cast shadow as deliberately as they cast light.

That refusal to separate the beautiful from the investigated is the through-line. Trimarchi and Farresin describe their work as a design counterculture of resistance: research into real needs and new technology that enriches, rather than merely decorates, the quality of life. The object, when it appears, is the argument made touchable.

Redesigning the Institution Itself

The Serpentine fellowship is the logical next move. Over three years, Formafantasma will not design an exhibition; they will audit the institution, assessing the sustainability of the gallery's day-to-day systems, from how it builds shows to how it runs its spaces, and proposing structural change from the inside. Serpentine chief executive Bettina Korek framed it as extending ecological thinking into the gallery's systems, spaces and everyday practices, probing the complex role an institution plays within the ecological crisis.

It is a striking commission: a design studio hired not to make anything, but to rethink how a cultural body consumes, builds and discards. For a discipline still addicted to the launch, the new product, the reveal, Formafantasma offers a harder proposition. The most consequential design decision may not be the shape of the object at all, but whether it needed to exist, and what forest, flock or institution it quietly reshaped on its way into the room.