At Triennale Milano, a photographic exhibition reveals the private and public dimensions of Ettore Sottsass, between intimacy, travel and design vision
There is a moment when design ceases to be an object and becomes a life story. Ettore Sottsass. Mise en scène , on view at Triennale Milano from December 12, 2025 to February 15, 2026, occupies precisely this threshold, offering an intimate and layered portrait of one of the great masters of 20th-century design and architecture.
Through photography, the exhibition brings Sottsass’s everyday existence to the foreground, observed as a sequence of scenes in which love, work, travel and design thinking coexist without clear separations. A visual narrative that shifts the focus from the icon to lived experience, from product to person.
Ettore Sottsass Mise en scène: a story told through images
The exhibition Ettore Sottsass. Mise en scène presents around 1,200 black-and-white and color photographs, taken between 1976 and 2007. The exhibition path follows a timeline that stretches from Sottsass’s meeting with Barbara Radice to the year of his passing, unfolding a dense and layered visual diary that intertwines private and public life without hierarchies.
The images depict domestic moments, journeys, encounters, work environments and everyday pauses, constructing a fluid narrative in which the boundary between personal life and professional practice dissolves.
Photography, emotions and everyday life
According to Marco Sammicheli, Director of the Italian Design Museum, the exhibition takes shape as an emotional kaleidoscope: places, people, architectures and fragments of life coexist within a single narrative. Milan, Filicudi, the United States, French Polynesia, India, Iran and Syria become the settings of a story that spans decades and geographies, always keeping Ettore Sottsass’s gaze at its center.
Photography thus plays a crucial role—not merely as documentation, but as a narrative tool capable of restoring atmospheres, relationships and emotional states.
The “mise en scène” of life
The title Mise en scène recalls a vision deeply connected to Ettore Sottsass: life as representation, akin to a play built on an open and partly improvised script. Each image becomes an act, each gesture a scene, each journey a change of backdrop.
As Stefano Boeri, President of Triennale Milano, notes, this vast photographic archive represents the almanac of an intense and shared love, long preserved and now returned to the public realm.
An editorial project and partner support
On the occasion of the exhibition Ettore Sottsass. Mise en scène , Dario Cimorelli Editore publishes a bilingual volume (Italian/English) featuring texts by Stefano Boeri, Barbara Radice, Christoph Radl and Micaela Sessa, offering deeper insight into the themes and images of the exhibition.
The initiative forms part of the ongoing research developed by Triennale Milano in collaboration with Studio Sottsass, with the support of institutional partners Deloitte and Fondazione Deloitte, Gruppo Lavazza, and Salone del Mobile.Milano.
