Draga & Aurel’s presentation at RoCollectible gives a voice to what is not longer valuable thanks to Rossana Orlandi Gallery, a landmark for contemporary design in Milan. The Gallery has carefully selected the work of more than 90 international designers to present RoCollectible 2025 on the occasion of Milan Design week. RoCollectible 2025 has focused on showing the innate ability designers possess to transform materials in unique ways and to bend shared realities between the past and the future.
Among the selected pieces for RoCollectible 2025, Draga & Aurel’s collaboration is one that cannot go unnoticed. Draga & Aurel is a multidisciplinary studio based in Italy that has aimed to redefine the term upcycling in the design sector. In this opportunity, Draga & Aurel presented “Reflected Thoughts” an exhibition that plays with light, matter, color and material.
“Reflected Thoughts” presents three new main furnishings that facilitate the discussion between painting and design. The first piece, “The Rescue Me Series,” can be described as a masterpiece of the upcycling endeavour. Using materials that were originally discarded as old furniture and parts from previous exhibitions made by the duo, Draga & Aurel engage in a process of metamorphosis that largely relies on utilizing resin to create a new piece. Each “Rescue Me” item converts normal surfaces into tactile paintings full of fluorescent accents. The duo describes the creation process of this piece as a “declaration to give dignity to the incomplete.”
The second piece the “Cadre Sideboard” focuses on the interplay between matter, light and color. Based on Bettina Bürkle’s work on transparency and perception, the “Cadre Sideboard” was designed as a collectible piece composed of a lucite structure, sliding panels and colored surfaces. The mixture of these elements gives to the piece a playful yet sober look that represents a constant evolving in the creative process of Draga & Aurel.
The last piece, the “Phebe Pendant Lamps,” is a hand-made recreation on how light can be an ethereal and magnetic presence that spreads into empty space. Inspired by the Space-Age aesthetic, the lamps consist of an upper-disk made out of lucite, a lower-disk made out of several castings of epoxy resin, and an adjustable tilt with variable intensity. Each of these elements interplays with light in order to create a “satellite” that subtly breaks silence and engages time, light and matter.
Draga & Aurel’s participation at the RoCollectible 2025 is a clear example of how Galleria Rossana Orlandi keeps on its quest to look for unique objects that communicate with each other outside of time and space. The idea portrayed by the Draga & Aurel exhibition of giving a voice to what is no longer valuable is an important statement for our modern, techno-feudal era that cannot be overlooked.
