A few days ago, a Milanese friend wrote to ask if I’d make it to Salone this year. As I scrolled to reply, I stumbled on an earlier exchange where I’d been told to loosen my grip on the past. 

That same morning, one of my stonemasons wondered why I seemed so preoccupied with what’s ahead instead of taking in what we’ve already done. I sat with both those observations for a while. Which is it? Or is that the point?

Nearly thirty years ago, I wrote and sang a pop song called Victimes du Temps that climbed to the top of the charts in several countries. Its title translates as Victims of Time, and it feels karmic today in ways I could not have anticipated when I wrote it. Embracing patience and a slower approach as remedies against hardship was the proposition, hoping to soothe the often prevalent anxious side of our nature. And yet here I am, still puzzling over the same riddle, constantly feeling neither here nor there, perpetually landing in that uncertain space between solid grounds. The word liminal seems to be so exhausted by overuse in recent years that I hesitated to invoke it. And yet it is, quite simply, the name of that betwixt and in-between space many of us so often seem to occupy.

As I miss Milan’s annual ritual of collective revelation for the fourth time since launching my collectible design practice in 2018, I drift between FOMO and JOMO with nauseating ambivalence, searching for that exact middle ground where survival and balance become, briefly, the same thing.

My feeds, meanwhile, are erupting. A dizzying flux of images and narratives from the world’s undisputed capital of design floods every screen. Formafantasma presents Salone Raritas, bringing collectible works into the heart of the main trade event. Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of OMA present their masterplan for Salone Contract 2027and its evolving ecosystem. Aurea, an Architectural Fiction, the immersive installation by Paris-based Maison Numéro 20, led by Oscar Lucien Ono, dissolves the boundaries between hospitality, narrative and space. Beyond the fairgrounds, the city itself performs its annual miracle, gloriously reaffirming its reputation as the undisputed capital of design.

A chosen absence is not always easy to distinguish from one that was chosen for you.

Last year I presented work in Beirut, London, Paris, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, a reminder that I am not new to showing up. I remember the unparalleled excitement of moving through Milan during Salone, from one incredible venue to the next. I look forward to taking part in it in due time. But from where I sit, there were projects I had been building toward for months which I can’t wait to unveil.

These were not peripheral commissions but rather what I like to call flagship interventions, the visible, public punctuation marks that give resonance to everything happening in the shadows of the work. Quiet orders and research, proportions revised by a centimeter that change the entire feeling of an object, requests we chose to honor knowing that our process does not allow for countless simultaneous commitments. The ones the world sees lead the works that live in more shadowed spaces but where the making also lives. Then the geopolitical realities reshaping the region again made way for humanity’s most barbaric inclinations. And just like the projects that were held in stockrooms, airports and workshops, many of us were thrown yet again into that liminal space.

Salone’s theme this year is A Matter of Salone, a return to materiality, to process, to the gesture that precedes the form. It resonates, not coincidentally, with the curatorial vision of the Design Doha Biennial’s Arab Design Now, Foregrounding Context, itself postponed to this coming November due to the very geopolitical turbulence it aims to stand against. SaloneSatellite, a perennial laboratory of emerging voices, frames its 2026 edition around the return to ‘making’ as a cultural and political act, a position I fully align with. Taken together, this reads like a kind of cultural weather report. Even at the world’s largest design fair, in its most spectacular season, the conversation is turning inward: toward process, toward patience.

I’ve come to think that ideas, when shaped by honed instinct and expertise, are as valid a raw material as wood, metal, or stone. But instinct, like any material, has limits. There is only so much a single mind can absorb before it begins to lose clarity. For me, that boundary matters as a condition for sincerity, for making work that carries both intention and weight.

Egyptian alabaster onyx forms over millions of years. Layer over translucent layer, mineral over mineral, time folding into stone. When light passes through it, you are not looking at a material. You are looking at duration made visible. The alabaster vessels in the Egyptian Museum, some four thousand years old, still hold their presence with complete authority. They come from the same quarries I work with today. That continuity is not accidental. It is the reward of a particular kind of attention, maintained across an almost incomprehensible span of human time.

I think about this when people ask about fast production, scale, output, weight. The most precious things rarely negotiate with urgency. A focus on process and matter could therefore point out to that slower approach we talked about earlier.

And yet, pop legend Madonna has said in multiple interviews that she wrote the lyrics to one of her biggest hits,Vogue, in less than ten minutes. The idea for my first Encapsulated series and for my Birth Chair arrived in a matter of seconds and while these are not exactly international pop hits, they have been best selling works in my world. I also can thrive when I move fast. Should we learn to slow down to allow for those potent fast moments to happen?

Which brings me to two writers whose works I have cherished at different points in time. They both approached slowness from opposing views.

In La Lenteur (1995), Milan Kundera writes:
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

At an opposite end, in Abdellah Taïa‘s La Vie Lente (2019), slowness is not restoration, it is depletion: “Without Manon, there is only futile waiting. Promises that never materialize. Time and space warping out of shape. The slow life. Interminable. Meaning nothing anymore”.

Also, on exile as a space evacuated of memory, which is ironically why I eventually exiled myself to Cairo, when I thought I had exhausted Paris:
“Our houses of exile are safer, their walls are bare. Here, our dreams are safe but no longer hold any memories.”

In Kundera’s book, slowing down is an act of recovery: memory retrieved, depth restored. In Taïa’s, enforced slowness hollows time out entirely, exile as a room without echo, where dreams survive but cannot accumulate.

Most of us who have moved through deep ends of different cultures, languages, and different versions of ourselves are bound to encounter those spaces where left becomes right and right becomes left, all at once. Where missing Milan’s Salone feels like a mistake, and also like a moment when timing simply doesn’t align. Gift? Punishment?

Astrologers have identified 2026 as the beginning of the age of Aquarius, my star sign. I opened the year’s diaries with a reflection on unity. But on January 1st, tax inspectors rang my doorbell, and a few weeks later another senseless war disrupted an already fragile world, displacing part of my family and jeopardizing months of work. 

So while I remain fundamentally optimistic, trusting in the larger scheme of things, in the necessity of shadow to reveal light, I am still trying to find stable ground within that liminal space so many of us are asked to navigate.

I think of the work ahead, and of the exceptional voices who have and will join these pages in the coming months, with deep gratitude and eagerness.

Until then, from my particular liminal space to yours, I encourage you to find, in your present moment, something worth holding on to. That something always exists. Optimism, if you can reach it. Patience, if you cannot. And above all, safety, for those to whom it is not yet given.

Happy month of May 2026