Essays, Issue 9

Fondazione Prada

A Place of Questions

Words VALENTINA BUZZI

Photography ANDY MASSACCESI

There is a sense of pilgrimage to Fondazione Prada. To approach its Milan campus — a plethora of industrial skeletons and visionary additions located in Porta Romana, on the outskirts of Milan — is to enter a world spun of contradictions and brutalist grace. Here, the buildings’ past as a distillery and their present as a world-renowned art institution breathe together like old friends, courtesy of the vision brought by Miuccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas. You feel it before you fully see it: the contrast between the concrete elements of the original buildings and the standing sentinel of the tower that hosts the Haunted House — once austere but now glowing gold against the often gloomy sky of Italy’s financial capital; the tender shuffle of feet across its courtyard; words exchanged on a pleasant break at the Bar Luce; visitors of all ages navigating the spaces like wanderers on a quiet quest.

When Fondazione Prada was founded in 1993 by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, its primary objective was deceptively simple: to create a place where contemporary art could be explored alongside rigorous research and intellectual exchange. What began as a modest and itinerant program of monographic shows and philosophical symposia has evolved into one of the most dynamic cultural institutions globally, one that thrives precisely on working with what would be traditionally defined as constraints rather than conventional expectations. In the early years, lacking a fixed home was a liberation that shaped its spirit.

“Every show was an experiment,” reflects Chiara Costa, Head of Programs. Without walls to call its own, the Foundation roamed like a restless idea, working with philosophers and film restorers, reimagining landmark exhibitions like Harald Szeemann’s 1969 “When Attitudes Become Form” for a new audience. “That was a radical gesture,” Costa explains. “Remakes as a curatorial practice weren’t common then. It was our way of rethinking what an exhibition can do — preserving its original spirit but looking at it with a contemporary lens.” The constraint of impermanence gave the Foundation its voice, encouraging research over spectacle and depth over décor, leading to bold thematic shows investigating subjects such as the archaeology of ideas, the commodification of artists’ multiples, and even the theft of ideas in contemporary art.

When Rem Koolhaas and OMA transformed the 1910s distillery into the Foundation’s permanent campus in 2015, architecture became another interlocutor. The complex stands as a testament to the philosophy that constraints become catalysts for creativity. The Podium’s glass walls speak to the city outside; the Haunted House glimmers with gold leaf and houses the evocative works of Robert Gober, who was given carte blanche for the space, and Louise Bourgeois; the Cisterna holds light like a chalice. The Torre, reaching upwards (a new addition), contains “Atlas” — a dialogue across generations of artists, from Jeff Koons to Lucio Fontana — while on the ground level, visitors stumble upon installations that seem as much summoned as displayed. Every inch carries its history and peculiar light, so that challenges like acoustics, temperature, and the idiosyncratic play of natural illumination do not stifle possibility but inspire it.

This openness to constraint and dialogue has shaped Fondazione Prada’s most transformative projects. One of its most ambitious investigations was “Human Brain,” developed in 2018 and exhibited from 2020. The show gathered diverse materials — scientific data, historical artifacts, videos — to explore the complexities of neuroscience without simplifying it. “That was a turning point,” Costa observes. “Scientific topics can feel forbidding to the public. But we learned that the key is not to reduce complexity; it is to stage the conversation.” “Human Brain” unfolded as a symposium of scientific images and inquiries into consciousness, bringing neuroscientists and artists together to reflect on the scientific process as a cultural artifact in its own right.

The Foundation’s cinema program, curated by Paolo Moretti, has become a sanctuary for independent and experimental filmmaking that embraces meta-cinematic explorations. Paolo Moretti’s monthly programming has given rise to a vibrant community of cinephiles of all ages who celebrate a diversity of formats and genres, from experimental shorts to radical restorations of forgotten films. The recently announced Foundation’s cinema fund exemplifies its commitment to supporting filmmaking beyond box office logic. “Our goal is not to produce commercial hits,” Costa says. “We want to be co-conspirators in a different kind of cinema, one that might struggle to find a home elsewhere.” This includes extraordinary collaborations like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s VR meditation “Carne y Arena,” which transformed viewers into participants, and a long-term partnership with Jean-Luc Godard that illuminated his creative process from within.

This commitment to process and dialogue reaches beyond cinema and contemporary art into the heart of public engagement. The Foundation insists that its audiences — children, students, scholars, tourists, and the merely curious — are capable of more than they often believe. From the Accademia dei Bambini, an ever-evolving, hands-on world that gives early childhood its due attention and creates lifelong connections to art, cinema, and architecture, to symposiums that convene scholars across disciplines, the Foundation holds fast to the belief that audiences deserve to be challenged and inspired. “Never underestimate your public,” Costa often reiterates, emphasizing how even the most radical, difficult concepts can thrive when carefully staged.

This philosophy is evident in ambitious undertakings, such as the years-long collaboration with Thierry de Cordier on an exhibition about crucifixion in the Cisterna, where the difficult natural overhead light became part of the narrative, and visitors were invited to experience its measured rhythm rather than passively consume it. Every project begins with what Costa describes as “a simple question: Why do this today? What can this show contribute?” The answer is never about perfection or trend-chasing, but about embracing the creative process as a series of constraints that shape the path and force constant reevaluation.

More than a museum, Fondazione Prada is a place of questions. Why this? Why here? Why now? Within its walls — and along its bridges to Venice and beyond, including Tokyo and Shanghai — the Foundation practices a kind of radical hospitality that welcomes audiences into these questions. It treats architecture as a collaborator, cinema as a ritual, and research as an art form. Under Costa’s gentle stewardship, it insists that constraint is not a limit but a practice: a way of becoming more present, more attentive to the materials, histories, and futures that gather in these halls. Inspired by Miuccia Prada’s intuition that making mistakes is a necessary part of the process, the program of Fondazione Prada views creativity across the boundaries that drive ambition and invite constant discovery.

In this quiet pilgrimage through a world that feels forever unfinished, often on the edge, stepping into the Foundation allows us to understand life’s complexity through a form of radicality that, far from alienating, invites us to come closer.