Nacho Carbonell – Memory, in practice

MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome

Architectural and art installation documentation, 2025

This series documented Nacho Carbonell: Memory, in practice at MAXXI in Rome, a site-specific installation that transformed the museum hall into an inhabitable landscape beneath a seven-metre tree. The photographs follow the interplay between the branching structure, nets and handmade furnishings, tracing how Carbonell’s materials and forms translate personal memories of gardens and the sea into a shared space for visitors to pause, observe and imagine.

Spanish designer Nacho Carbonell (Valencia, 1980) transforms the MAXXI hall into a visionary landscape dominated by a striking seven-meter-tall tree. Beneath its branches, woven with fishing nets, an inhabitable space emerges. This welcoming environment is filled with objects and furnishings that allow visitors to pause, observe and imagine.

—

Exhibition text by MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome

Nacho Carbonell: Memory, in practice, curated by Martina Muzi, inaugurates the first edition of ENTRATE, a multi-year programme dedicated to design, launched by the Department of Architecture and Contemporary Design under the direction of Lorenza Baroncelli. At the core of Carbonell’s artistic practice is a recurring and intimate theme: personal memory. The designer’s creative process is characterised by an invisible thread that binds together materials, gestures and forms, drawing upon the natural landscapes of his childhood. For Carbonell, memory is not a static repository of recollections; rather, it is a dynamic instrument for design. This concept engages with reality, allows for deconstruction and undergoes continuous regeneration. As with memory itself, layered with images and emotions, the artist’s creative process intertwines nature and artifice, handcraft and industrial fabrication, in a fluid dialogue between past and present, matter and vision.

Memory, in practice is an evocative reconstruction of a space inspired by the places of Carbonell’s youth, spent between the garden of his family home and the sea surrounding Valencia. The architectural form is realised through materials that evoke memory, employing experimental building techniques developed by the designer over time. The multifaceted world of Nacho Carbonell’s design enters MAXXI to demonstrate how design, rooted in personal memory and shaped by experimentation, can expand to generate new collective memories through use, function and the stories of those who experience it.

Back to art and architecture photography – selected works