THE LAST PICTURE

Given this year’s focus — the power of the image — it’s only fitting that the lectures, conversations, and performances (this year was the first time music was integrated into the programming) took place mainly inside the Sacrestia, a Renaissance space attributed to Bramante that sits within the same complex as The Last Supper itself, its walls lined with inlaid cabinets of early sixteenth-century biblical scenes by Domenico and Francesco Morone and its ceiling painted an otherworldly shade of purple and scattered with gold stars.

There is an irony in the choice of venue that wasn’t lost on visitors. Santa Maria delle Grazie sits directly opposite Casa degli Atellani, now owned by LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, placing Prada’s symposium on the politics and power of images quite literally across the street from its greatest luxury rival. During a Milan Design Week increasingly powered by luxury branding and image-making, the setup was almost too perfect: one of fashion’s most sophisticated image machines convening a conversation about images within eyeshot of another. A contradiction, a provocation, or possibly both.

The decision to host the talks in a divine space only underlined the gravity of the conversations and themes invoked (watching participants walk down the aisle each morning had the solemn choreography of a wedding processional). “When you enter a space like a church, you can already reflect on many issues of contemporary culture — from the political to social differences and ecology — even in a space that’s more than 600 years old,” says Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma in between one of the talks in one of the cloisters in the complex as a couple of Dominican Friars walked by — Rawsthorn mentioned that some had sat in on the proceedings, though her Italian wasn’t good enough to know what they made of it. I asked the design partners why they turned their focus to images during a week when everyone else is focused on objects and experiences — more chairs, more installations, more product launches.. “I don’t think it’s about objects anymore,” Farresin said of Salone and the design world more broadly. “It is about images.”

Over the course of three days, artists, photographers, filmmakers, theorists, poets, and researchers including Alvaro Barrington, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, Paola Antonelli, Kate Crawford, Deborah Willis, Momtaza Mehri, Barbara Maria Stafford, Marine Brutti of (La)Horde, and Mark Leckey, each approached how images function as cultural, political, and material forces in different ways. Barrington, who grew up between a Caribbean Catholic church and a Black church in New York, spoke about how both spaces used images to hold people as they are, not as they should be — and about the radical politics embedded in that act of representation. Lebanese artist and archivist Akram Zaatari used a single concrete moment — the displacement of metadata of images he took on his iPhone near the Beirut National Museum, which placed him instead at the airport — to open out into a broader argument about the instability of the digital archive. New media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun proposed her idea of the “generous image,” that even amid the glut of the visual world, images retain the capacity to exceed their function and build new relations between people. Art historian Barbara Maria Stafford argued that as AI swamps us with synthetic pictures, we are hungering more than ever for the physical and the tactile, pointing to the rise of landscape architecture as a template for all future design as proof of this desire away from pixels and artificial imagery and towards something wild and real.

Leckey built his talk around a single disembodied white leg in Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, an early Renaissance painting caught between two worldviews — the bottom half experimenting with Alberti’s new theories of perspective, the top half remaining resolutely flat and medieval. And throughout it all, Rawsthorn drew on everything from the photographs of Lucia Moholy (wife of László Moholy-Nagy), whose idealized photographs of the Bauhaus shaped global perception of the school for decades despite the fact that she seldom got credit for it, to Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, who understood that controlling the image — civil servants in traditional tunics instead of Western suits, officials on bicycles instead of in luxury cars — was inseparable from controlling the political narrative. Crawford opened her nighttime talk inside the Basilica with the oldest image ever discovered: two hand stencils made over 67,000 years ago, found this past January in the Liang Metanduno cave on Muna, an island off southeastern Sulawesi in Indonesia, and ended with a critical dissection of Fruit Love Island, the AI-generated animated series that became TikTok’s fastest-growing account in history. AI slop, she noted, now constitutes close to three quarters of all new content on the web.

Prada Frames wasn’t the only programming the brand did this Milan Design Week. At a new Prada Home retail space on Via Montenapoleone, Theaster Gates unveiled Chawan Cabinet — an exhibition built around the Japanese ceramic tradition, with tea bowls and vessels by Gates’ studio and Japanese artisans arranged within a reconstructed domestic interior, a courtyard tea house, and a soundscape of vintage records. Meanwhile, Miu Miu’s Literary Club returned to the Circolo Filologico Milanese under the theme “Politics of Desire,” using the work of Annie Ernaux and Ama Ata Aidoo as starting points for three days of conversation on sexuality, consent, and female autonomy, culminating in a public reading room. But Frames remained the most rigorous iteration of design thinking on offer, its range of approaches to the image — historical, political, material, algorithmic — as vertiginous as the visual world it set out to understand.

From cave walls to algorithmic slop, Prada Frames’ vast academic territory traced how images have always been instruments of transformation and control in equal measure. As always, Prada Frames was an intellectual breather from the frothy new collections and branded aperitivos of Milan Design Week. “Milan Design Week is obviously, at its core, a commercial furniture fair, but it is also the biggest single design event annually worldwide. It always seems slightly disappointing that there wasn’t a more serious analysis of design and its current and future possibilities during Milan Design Week,” says Rawsthorn. Prada Frames provided that in spades, and differentiated itself by its restraint; despite the focus on images, there were no screens or PowerPoints inside the divine Sacrestia. A select few images were printed in daily booklets outlining the talks — a pure cerebral flex against both our age of oversaturated images and Salone’s ever-escalating spectacle.