Memento Vivere

A collection of three lamps exploring time, life and light — presented at Isola Design Festival, Milan Design Week 2025

challenge

How do you translate something as abstract as the passage of time into a functional object? The brief — Design is Human, Isola Fuorisalone 2025 — called for design as a tool for reflection. Not decoration, but artefacts capable of generating emotion and dialogue.

solution

Three lamps, three phases of life. Childhood, adulthood, old age — each expressed through a distinct form, light technology and marble finish. The collection takes its name from Goethe's reframing of "Memento Mori": not a reminder of death, but an exhortation to live fully, with the intensity of the last time and the wonder of the first.

Memento Vivere proposes light as a symbolic material — not just functional, but philosophical. The combination of handcrafted marble bases and LED profiles holds the tension between tradition and modernity, past and future. Presented at Stecca3, Isola Design Festival 2025, the collection was selected within the "Design is Human" programme — a call for projects placing the human experience at the centre of design practice.

Three lamps, three formal languages.

Childhood: a circular LED profile in RGBW — infinite colour, a rough unfinished marble base that suggests growth still underway.
Adulthood: a broken line in dynamic white LED, adjustable between warm and cold, a rotating base almost entirely smooth but retaining raw details — because personal evolution never fully stops.
Old age: a straight vertical line reaching upward, a pinpoint spotlight projecting a circle of light onto the ceiling like a star, the base engraved with the words "Memento Vivere" — a reference to funerary art, a contrast between earthly end and the light that seeks to go beyond it.

The marble bases trace the arc of life through three finishing states — rough, partially smooth, fully polished. The LED profiles were produced in collaboration with Aeoss Lighting, a Bergamo-based company specialised in architectural and decorative light solutions. Technology and craft in the same object: what has been and what will be, held together by light.

Concept

Reframing "Memento Mori"

The starting point was Goethe's inversion of the Latin saying — not a reminder of death, but an exhortation to live fully. The design question became: how do you give philosophical weight to a domestic object without making it heavy? Light as the answer — a material that is simultaneously functional, atmospheric and symbolic.

Design

Three forms, three lives

Each lamp required its own formal language — one that communicated the essence of a life phase without illustration. The circle for childhood: infinite, complete, boundless. The broken line for adulthood: interrupted, redirected, never fully resolved. The vertical line reaching upward for old age: aspirational, transcendent, seeking what lies beyond.

Materials

Marble and LED in dialogue

Marble bases in three finishing states — rough, partially smooth, fully polished — to trace the arc of life. LED profiles by Aeoss Lighting specified for each lamp: RGBW for childhood's emotional range, dynamic white for adulthood's functional demands, white strip and pinpoint spotlight for old age's dual nature — warm presence below, a point of light projected above like a star.

year

2025

Client

Isola Design Festival, Milan Design Week 2025 - Aeoss Lighting; In collab with Michele Zanchi (Studio Cronchi)