Premio Gallarate is an Italian visual arts prize dating back to 1949, whose original aim of supporting local artistic production led to the creation of a modern and contemporary art gallery in the northern industrial town of Varese in Lombardy. Today the gallery is widely known as the Ma*GA.

For the last two months, Ma*GA has been shining a light on the history of Italian design, from its post-war boom to the fragmentation of styles in the last decades of the 20th century, and on the current, pluralistic forms that have helped shape its future since the early 00s. Two exhibitions running until 2 March 2025 – "Art and Design. Design is Art" and "Hyperdesign: XXVII Premio Nazionale Arti Visive Città di Gallarate" – chart the shared theme of design's dialogue with art, and its varied reaches. Installation concept and development for both is by London and Milan-based research agency Parasite 2.0.

Formafantasma were invited to take part in "Hyperdesign" by curator Chiara Alessi, to feature alongside projects, initiatives, collectives and fellow designers tackling the hottest topics in design discourse: climate, sustainability and the environment, but also inclusiveness and access to means of production, and labour and gender divide.

The Design Academy Eindhoven-trained duo’s decade-long research into the ecological, historical, political and social forces at play within material production and associated supply chains and waste streams has seen them investigate new ways of thinking about the use of disparate materials, from timber and volcanic rock to natural polymers extracted from plants and animal derivatives.

"Hyperdesign" looks at the outcomes achieved by Formafantasma through the "Botanica" (2011) phase, with the resulting series of organic-form vessels; their journey in timber investigation, started with "Cambio" (2020) and which recently brought about the relaunch of Alvar Alto’s iconic stool for Artek, made of birch plywood and displaying imperfections once rejected by furniture manufacturers' standards; and finally, ExCinere (2019), designed in collaboration with Dzek to re-evaluate the role of non-extracted volcanic ash.