{"id":296389,"date":"2026-04-27T11:50:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/?p=296389"},"modified":"2026-04-27T11:54:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:54:39","slug":"spazio-viruly-hits-the-rawest-note-at-mdw-2026-with-unboxing-a-room-as-instrument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/design\/spazio-viruly-hits-the-rawest-note-at-mdw-2026-with-unboxing-a-room-as-instrument\/","title":{"rendered":"Spazio Viruly hits the rawest note at MDW 2026 with UNBOXING: A Room as Instrument"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spazio Viruly hits the rawest note at MDW 2026 with UNBOXING: A Room as Instrument<\/h3>\r\n\r\n
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Unboxing_MDW26_Spazio Viruly \u00a9Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

I<\/span>n a city that reinvents itself once a year with an almost violent intensity, one exhibition cuts through the spectacle with surgical precision. Spazio Viruly's UNBOXING: A Room as Instrument is not asking for your attention. It is taking it apart.<\/p>\r\n

Milan, Reinvented Again<\/h4>\r\n

Milan Design Week 2026 runs from April 20 to 26, framed by the Fuorisalone theme \"Be the Project,\" a provocation that shifts the spotlight from finished objects to the processes, decisions, and responsibilities behind them. The city's design ecosystem splinters into competing narratives: luxury brands staging cathedral-scale spectacles, tech giants deploying multisensory environments, and a younger generation of practitioners staking out something rawer, more structural and more honest.<\/p>\r\n

The 2026 edition marks the 64th Salone del Mobile and the 17th edition of the Brera Design District programme, with designers encouraged to celebrate both process and result in equal measure.<\/p>\r\n

In this context, the choice to plant a show inside Superattico, a compact double-height space in the Porta Venezia Design District visible directly from the street, reads as a deliberate statement. Spazio Viruly, the Rotterdam-based platform for the development and presentation of new design work, is not interested in the pageant. It is interested in what is underneath it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Spazio Viruly installation view, Superattico \u00a0\u00b7 \u00a0Photo: Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>

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Unboxing_MDW26_Spazio Viruly \u00a9Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

The Exhibition: Anatomy of a Concept<\/h4>\r\n

UNBOXING brings together two Rotterdam-based designers, Matthijs Koerts and Merijn Haenen, whose practices share a fundamental obsession: the hidden logic of things. Both dismantle familiar devices, whether acoustic, electrical, or structural, down to their essential components: energy, tension, light, and sound. Then they put them back together as spatial propositions, asking you to experience these forces as phenomena rather than functions. The title is not a metaphor. It is a method. The exhibition literally unpacks the mechanics of the objects it stages, leaving their anatomies exposed and their inner workings available for close inspection. There is no polish, no concealment. The construction logic is always on view. This is design in the act of thinking out loud.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Unboxing_MDW26_Spazio Viruly \u00a9Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>

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Unboxing_MDW26_Spazio Viruly \u00a9Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>

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UNBOXING, installation view, Superattico, Milan \u00a0\u00b7 \u00a0Photo: Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Spanning a compact, double-height space, the exhibition responds directly to the architecture of Superattico, which is visible from the street, allowing the installation to be legible both externally and internally. Visitors are encouraged to move freely around the works, engaging closely with their construction, materiality, and sensory impact.<\/p>\r\n

Matthijs Koerts: Sound Made Visible<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
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Anatomy of Sound, Matthijs Koerts \u00a0\u00b7 Photo: Sven Jansse<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Matthijs Koerts, born in Rotterdam in 1998, graduated cum laude from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2025. His project Anatomy of Sound is the centrepiece of his contribution to UNBOXING: large, open speaker structures suspended in the double-height space of Superattico, stripped of their enclosures and left to perform in plain sight. Membranes, coils, magnets, the inner workings of acoustic reproduction systems, are transformed from hidden hardware into spatial protagonists.<\/p>\r\n

Without their usual boxes, these speakers turn the entire room into a resonant body. The architecture vibrates. Sound becomes something you feel rather than simply hear, its production physically traceable from source to surface. Koerts makes audibility legible, converting an invisible phenomenon into something you can read spatially, almost architecturally.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Anatomy of Sound (detail), Matthijs Koerts \u00a0\u00b7 \u00a0Photo: Sven Jansse<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Complementing the speaker installation, Koerts presents De Matrijs, a series of ceramic vases and aluminium furniture developed from a modular mould system. Here the tool becomes the subject. The mould, normally a disposable means to an end, is promoted to the status of a design language. The seams, the joints, the traces of manufacture: all of it is kept visible, framing the act of fabrication as a form of expression in its own right.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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De Matrijs pouf, Matthijs Koerts \u00b7 Photo: Sven Jansse<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Merijn Haenen: Light as Infrastructure<\/h4>\r\n

Merijn Haenen operates in a different register, one shaped by the visual language of urban commercial display. Born in Beringe in 1989, Haenen graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam in 2014. His practice began in graphic design, working with posters, printed matter, and logos before gravitating toward physical materials and spatial installations. The migration from two dimensions to three is palpable in the work: his light installations retain the composition logic of the printed page, the tension between figure and f ield, even as they sprawl into architectural space.<\/p>\r\n

For UNBOXING, Haenen deploys neon tubes, connectors, tension straps, and translucent surfaces drawn directly from the vocabulary of urban infrastructure. These components are not disguised or repurposed in the conventional sense. They are repositioned: placed in structural assemblies where their construction logic is always legible, where the seams of the system remain part of the aesthetic equation. Light becomes an active force in the room, not a finishing touch but a structural material that bends, stretches, and reshapes how the space is perceived.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Building Kit no. 021, Merijn Haenen \u00b7 Photo: Noortje Knulst<\/p><\/div>

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Building Kit no. 025, Merijn Haenen \u00b7 Photo: Noortje Knulst<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

A Living Exhibition: Performance, Sound, Space<\/h4>\r\n

UNBOXING does not freeze once it opens. Throughout the week, the exhibition activates through a programme of listening sessions and live performances. Milan-based dancer Eleonora Cattaneo, who previously collaborated with Spazio Viruly during Rotterdam Art Week, returns to move within and against the installation, using the space itself as a score.<\/p>\r\n

The presence of a choreographic body within the speaker anatomies and neon assemblies is not decorative. It renders the installation's logic in time, making visible the same forces of tension and resonance that the objects themselves stage.<\/p>\r\n

A specially commissioned soundscape runs throughout the week, adding a further layer of sensory density to the already charged environment. This is not ambient filler. It is a compositional decision, an additional instrument in the room.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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UNBOXING installation view, Superattico \u00b7 Photo: Anwyn Howarth<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Rotterdam to Milan: A Platform, Not a Show<\/h4>\r\n

Spazio Viruly positions itself as something more durational than a gallery and less institutional than a foundation. It is a platform for the evolution of new work, and UNBOXING is a live demonstration of that mission. Both Koerts and Haenen exhibited together previously under the UnSculpted group show hosted by Spazio Viruly in Rotterdam, which means that Milan is not an introduction but a development, a chapter in an ongoing dialogue rather than a one-time presentation.<\/p>\r\n

The exhibition will extend its reach beyond the Fuorisalone circuit through public events in Rotterdam before and after the Milan dates, reflecting on the development of the project and deepening the exchange between the two cities. This continuous loop between Rotterdam and Milan strengthens what Spazio Viruly has been building quietly and with considerable conviction: a transversal design conversation that refuses to be pinned to a single geography or a single moment in the calendar.<\/p>\r\n

In a week when Milan is louder, more crowded, and more overstimulated than at any other point in the year, UNBOXING at Superattico is doing something countercultural. It is opening things up, exposing the seams, and inviting you to understand how it all works. That is, in the end, the most radical gesture a design exhibition can make.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Unboxing_MDW26_hero image<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

INFO:<\/h4>\r\n

Where: SUPERATTICO, VIA BARTOLOMEO EUSTACHI 40, PORTA VENEZIA DESIGN DISTRICT<\/p>\r\n

Dates: 20 - 26 April 2026<\/p>\r\n

Hours: 2pm - 10pm daily \u00b7 10am by appointment<\/p>\r\n

Designers: Matthijs Koerts \u00b7 Merijn Haenen<\/p><\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spazio Viruly hits the rawest note at MDW 2026 with UNBOXING: A Room as Instrument n a city that reinvents its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Spazio Viruly hits the rawest note at MDW 2026 with UNBOXING: A Room as Instrument #adf #npoadf #SpazioViruly #UNBOXING #MilanDesignWeek2026","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[38,43,55,69,80,83,101],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296389"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296412,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296389\/revisions\/296412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}