For the “Reduce, Reuse, Recreate” exhibition at the Triennale di Milano, 23BASSI displays Chris Broadbent’s photographs on large horizontal surfaces. This open-concept installation invites visitors to move around, bend down, and literally change their perspective on recycling.
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In the atrium of the Triennale di Milano, a photography exhibition that does away with walls and places the images at eye level. To view them, you have to get closer, move around, and look down from above: because changing your mind about recycling begins, quite literally, by changing your perspective.
How do you display a photograph without hanging it on a wall? And how do you talk about recycling without turning an exhibition into a lecture?
These questions inspired the exhibition “Reduce, Reuse, Recreate, ” created by 23BASSI in 2012 in the atrium of the Triennale di Milano. The exhibition featured a previously unseen collection of photographs by Chris Broadbent, commissioned to mark the fifteenth anniversary of CONAI, the National Packaging Consortium. The opening coincided with the presentation of the Sette Green Awards, dedicated to Italian excellence in the environmental field.
The photography project explored the second life of packaging through images that transformed everyday materials into almost surreal compositions. Steel, aluminum, paper, wood, plastic, and glass were shown before and after the recycling process: no longer mere waste, but materials ready to be turned into new objects, new products, and new possibilities.
The exhibition design translates this transition into a precise spatial gesture: the photographs are not hung vertically, but laid flat on large horizontal surfaces, raised off the floor and distributed throughout the lobby like islands.
A choice that immediately alters the usual relationship between the viewer and the image. One does not view it head-on from a predetermined distance: one approaches it, leans in, circles the piece, and seeks out the best vantage point. The body becomes part of the process of interpreting the image, and observation becomes a physical experience. To understand the image, one must make a small movement, momentarily setting aside one’s usual point of view.
The spread-out photographs also alter their very nature. From images meant to be contemplated, they become landscapes to be explored: surfaces teeming with objects, materials, reflections, and details that are gradually revealed. The visitor is not faced with a linear sequence, but finds themselves on a free-form journey, in which they can choose which image to start with and in which direction to proceed.
The Triennale’s atrium is a passageway, traversed by a constant flow of people and characterized by the large columns of the Palazzo dell’Arte. The project does not attempt to create a separate room within the building, but rather works with the existing space. The low structures preserve the views, do not obstruct the perception of the architecture, and allow the exhibition to be recognized from the entrances and surrounding pathways.
The layout of the exhibition floors follows the columns and allows for various paths through the space. The exhibition does not dictate a specific route; rather, it invites visitors to slow down, stray from the most direct path, and get closer to the images. The atrium remains open but temporarily changes its function, becoming at once a foyer, a gallery, and a gathering place.
The contrast between the dark surfaces of the exhibition design, the light-colored bases, and the vivid colors of the photographs draws attention to the images without competing with the architecture. The display elements are minimalist and unobtrusive: they establish the optimal viewing height, define the path through the exhibition, and then give the images center stage.
Communication, too, is stripped down to the essentials. The exhibition title sets the stage, while photographs and texts directly illustrate what can be reborn from recycled materials. The environmental message is not conveyed through a series of facts or rules, but through the power of images to make something ordinary seem extraordinary.
Sustainability is thus presented not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete transformation. A bottle, a box, or a can does not necessarily mark the end of a cycle—it can become the beginning of another. The photograph illustrates this possibility; the installation invites viewers to observe it from a different perspective.
“Reduce, Reuse, Recreate” is an exhibition project built around a few elements and a clear rule. No added walls, no predetermined path, no predetermined distance between the artwork and the visitor. Just images, horizontal surfaces, and people invited to move through the space.
Because an exhibition shouldn’t just present content. It must create the conditions for that content to be discovered, remembered, and, if possible, viewed with fresh eyes.
