Image Credit: Prada
For its fifth edition, Prada Frames brings its annual symposium to a Renaissance sacristy — and trains its lens on the most urgent question of our visual moment: can we still trust what we see?
Every April, while the rest of Milan’s design week runs on product launches and aperitivo invitations, Prada clears a different kind of space. Prada Frames, the annual symposium curated by design and research studio Formafantasma, running parallel to the Salone del Mobile since 2022, has always operated on a quieter frequency. This year’s edition, titled In Sight, may be its most timely yet.
The subject is images. Specifically: what they are now, what they cost, and whether they can still be trusted. In an era in which the line between human-authored and machine-generated imagery has been systematically erased, Prada Frames turns its attention to the image as a cultural, political, and material force — one that shapes not just how we see the world, but how we understand, negotiate, and inhabit it.
No longer a reliable depiction of truth. Reference points crumble. The distinction between real and represented — increasingly, irretrievably blurred.
Prada Frames: The Archive
2022
On Forest
The logics governing the modern timber industry — where ecology meets extraction.
2023
Materials in Flux
Hong Kong, then Milan. The ethical and aesthetic implications of materials.
2024
Being Home
The living environment as a lens for contemporary challenges.
2025
In Transit
Infrastructure as the dynamic system that enables, restricts, and shapes the movement of people, goods, data, and power.
2026 — In Sight
The symposium unfolds across three days of lectures and conversations — April 19, 20, and 21 — tracing the historical frameworks that have shaped ways of seeing, the environmental and social costs of digital imagery, and the economies of attention that govern how images circulate. It is a programme that refuses easy consolation: the point is not to arrive at solutions, but to sit with the full weight of the problem. The production of images, the press release notes pointedly, is far from immaterial. It relies on resource extraction, energy consumption, data storage, and forms of labor that mostly go unseen.
The setting is, as ever with Prada, precisely chosen. In Sight takes place within the complex of Santa Maria delle Grazie — the same church compound that houses Leonardo’s Last Supper — specifically in the Sacrestia, a Renaissance space traditionally attributed to Bramante. Its inlaid wooden cabinets, lined with biblical scenes painted by Domenico and Francesco Morone in the early sixteenth century, form a backdrop that makes the symposium’s central tensions almost physical: images and their making, belief and representation, the real and the depicted, across five centuries of the same room.
Small-group guided visits are offered to let participants engage directly with the architectural setting alongside the thematic framework. And to close out the three days, a special evening brings together a curated distillation of the symposium’s key ideas alongside a music performance — opening In Sight to a wider public beyond the invited participants.
