Studiopepe’s Les Arcanistes: Alchemy Inside a Milan Gold Works

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

A former gold works in Milan’s Porta Venezia, sealed off from the public for over a century, became the setting for Studiopepe’s most ambitious Manifesto Project. Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto built Les Arcanistes around a genuine piece of material history: the arcanists, the secret-formula chemists who cracked European porcelain nearly three centuries ago. The building they chose to tell that story in turns out to share more with it than either designer let on.

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Every April, Milan’s design calendar produces a handful of installations that people talk about for years after the fair itself is forgotten. In 2019, Studiopepe’s Les Arcanistes was one of them. The Milan interiors studio, founded by Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto, took over a former gold manufacture dating to the 1900s, a building never previously open to the public, and filled it with four sequential rooms built around water, stone, botany and divination.

The studio said almost nothing about the project before it opened. There was no advance imagery, no product list circulated to press, no explanation beyond a single line: that this year’s Manifesto Project would explore the bond between matter and the archetypal power of symbols. That silence did the work a press release usually does. By the time Milan Design Week 2019 opened on 9 April, Les Arcanistes was already one of the week’s most discussed presentations, running through to 14 April and remaining open by private appointment into the following month.

The title was not a flourish. Arcanists were real historical figures, proto-chemists who held closely guarded formulas for porcelain, glass and metalwork centuries before modern chemistry existed as a discipline. Studiopepe built an entire installation around that lineage, and the building they chose to do it in turns out to connect to that history more precisely than the project’s own framing let on.

Inside the gold works: four rooms, one journey

Les Arcanistes unfolded as a sequence rather than a single space, guiding visitors through a former industrial hall that had processed gold for most of the twentieth century and had never been open to the public before Studiopepe took it on. Sea foam paint covered the walls, cut through with neon signage rendered as cryptic symbols, and the four rooms each carried their own material logic.

The journey opened at the Source of the Vibrational Water, a room built around a central water feature that gave the whole installation its first ritual gesture. From there, visitors moved through the Materioteca, or Library of Matter, where stone slabs, onyx and a wall of raw material samples turned the room into something closer to a working archive than a showroom. The Alchemic Laboratory followed, arranged around glass vessels and distillation apparatus, its worktops given over to genuine botanical preparation rather than a styled approximation of one. The sequence closed below ground, in the Mantica Society, a white, salt-floored chamber reserved for divination.

Materials carried as much of the argument as the rooms themselves. Molten glass, worked by the Milan glassworks Vetreria Bazzanese into partitions and low tables, ran through the installation in violet and chartreuse, colours chosen to sit against the sea foam walls rather than blend into them. Salt covered the floor of the lower chamber entirely, a material choice with its own long history in purification ritual, and one that turned an ordinary basement into the installation’s most theatrical room without a single applied finish.

Who made it: Studiopepe, from a Milan rebus to a manifesto series

Studiopepe was founded in Milan in 2006 by Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto, both graduates of the Politecnico di Milano’s design faculty. The pair bring genuinely different instincts to the studio. Lelli Mami works across writing, analogue photography, collage, ceramics and gouache, treating material research as something closer to a personal studio practice than a design input. Di Pinto trained in fine art theory before working as a stylist and journalist for Italian and international magazines from the mid-1990s, and she has spoken about astrology as a discipline that genuinely informs how she reads a brief. Together they describe their method as one of contamination, letting contemporary references collide with historical ones until something unresolved and specific comes out the other side.

That instinct shows in the studio’s own account of its growth. An early product shoot built around visual rebus puzzles landed the cover of Italian design magazine Case da Abitare, and the studio’s reputation for image-making carried it into retail design work for the Max Mara Group from 2010 onward, alongside a long-running styling relationship with Elle Décor Italia. In 2015, Studiopepe staged Ossimori, its first standalone research project, at Fragile Gallery in Milan, a precursor to the annual Manifesto Project series that Les Arcanistes belongs to.

Les Arcanistes was the third instalment in that series, following The Visit in 2017 and Club Unseen in 2018, the latter winning a Frame Design Award the same year Les Arcanistes opened. The studio has kept the series running since: a filmed piece, De-siderio, in 2020, and Campo Base in 2023, a collaboration with five other Italian design practices exploring domestic intimacy. Studiopepe has returned to Milan Design Week nearly every year since 2019, staging L’Impero Dei Sensi for Visionnaire and Tales of Wonder across three central Milan sites in 2023, and Milanese Splendour for Sancal in 2022. The studio also completed its first hotel interior in 2019, for an Okko property at Paris’s Gare de l’Est, the same year Les Arcanistes opened in Milan.

The brands and makers who built the rooms

Les Arcanistes was staged as a studio manifesto, but it carried real product work from a wide field of collaborators. Tacchini contributed its Pastilles range in colourways developed specifically for the installation. Ceramica Bardelli supplied tile work from its Primitiva collection, laid through several of the rooms. Atelier Areti provided lighting from its Bonhomme series, and cc-tapis dressed sections of the installation with pieces from its Lunar Addiction collection. Furniture specialist paradisoterrestre produced pieces designed by Studiopepe itself, while Cassina‘s Beugel chair appeared alongside Baxter armchairs upholstered in a pale blue that became one of the installation’s recurring accents. The marble specialist Erika Cavallini supplied a set of carved vessels, and smaller makers, including Fenix and Tenolux, contributed a sculptural coffee table and a neon light piece respectively.

The performance elements were as carefully cast as the furniture. A butoh dancer moved through the water room, pouring and redistributing water as part of a slow, deliberate choreography rather than a fixed display. In the Alchemic Laboratory, trained botanical chemists worked through the run of the show, preparing herbal elixirs at benches set up for genuine preparation rather than demonstration. In the Mantica Society, a professional tarot reader worked with precious stones and small totems, offering readings to visitors who made their way down into the salt-floored room.

The real arcanists: what the title actually refers to

The word arcanist comes from the Latin arcanum, meaning secret, and it names a genuine occupation rather than a piece of invented mythology. Before 1708, true hard-paste porcelain, the fine white ceramic the Chinese had produced for centuries, remained a complete mystery to European manufacturers, who had spent generations failing to replicate it. That changed in Dresden, where Johann Friedrich Böttger, a young alchemist who had fled Berlin after claiming he could transmute base metal into gold, was working under the Saxon ruler Augustus II. Augustus had imprisoned Böttger specifically to make good on that claim. Böttger never produced gold. Working instead with the scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, he identified the correct combination of kaolin clay, alabaster and quartz, fired at temperatures above 1,300 degrees Celsius, and announced Europe’s first true porcelain in March 1709.

The Meissen factory that resulted guarded Böttger’s formula as a trade secret, employing arcanists, the term the Meissen workshop itself used for the specialists who held the knowledge, under conditions close to house arrest. It did not stay secret for long. Through the eighteenth century, arcanists defected to rival courts across Europe, carrying the formula with them for a price, in a chain of thefts and resales that eventually put porcelain production within reach of most European royal houses. It is this history, of guarded knowledge, imprisonment and material transformation, that gives Les Arcanistes its title real weight.

There is a detail in that history that Studiopepe’s own framing of the project never mentioned, and it connects directly to the building the studio chose. Böttger was locked up and set to work precisely because he claimed he could make gold. He failed at that, and made porcelain instead, in a building given over entirely to the pursuit of turning ordinary material into something precious. Les Arcanistes was staged inside a Milan gold works, a building whose entire twentieth century purpose was the same transformation Böttger had been imprisoned to perform three hundred years earlier. Whether or not the choice of venue was made with that resonance in mind, the building Studiopepe found for its manifesto on alchemy had already spent a century in the alchemist’s actual trade.

What Les Arcanistes gave its visitors

Studiopepe kept Les Arcanistes almost entirely private during Milan Design Week itself, running it by invitation before opening it to appointment-only visits through the following month. That restriction shaped the experience as much as the rooms did. Les Arcanistes was built for small groups moving slowly through a sequence designed to be felt rather than photographed in passing, with each room paced to hold a visitor’s attention for several minutes rather than several seconds.

The result was an installation that worked as both a product showcase and a genuine piece of world-building. Visitors left having seen new work from Tacchini, Bardelli, Areti and cc-tapis, but they also left having watched water poured with real ceremony, elixirs prepared at a working bench, and cards read in a room built specifically for that purpose. The installation asked real patience of its audience, and it gave back an atmosphere built to reward exactly that kind of attention.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file Les Arcanistes away as one more atmospheric Milan installation, a mood board built at full scale with a tarot reader thrown in for effect. That undersells what Studiopepe actually did. Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto built a design installation on a real chapter of material history, one involving a real imprisoned alchemist, a real guarded formula and a real trade in stolen secrets that shaped how porcelain spread across Europe. They then staged it inside a building that had spent a century performing its own version of the same transformation, turning raw material into something valuable behind closed doors.

That is the argument the installation was actually making, whether or not Studiopepe framed it in those exact terms: that the impulse to guard a formula, to work in secret, and to turn ordinary matter into something precious is not a historical curiosity but a continuous thread running from eighteenth-century Dresden to a twentieth-century Milan gold works to a design studio’s own workshop. Les Arcanistes gave that thread four rooms, a working laboratory bench, a tarot reader and a butoh dancer, and let visitors walk through it slowly enough to notice.

Studiopepe has kept returning to Milan Design Week nearly every year since, through Campo Base, Tales of Wonder and a run of brand collaborations that show no sign of slowing. Les Arcanistes remains the clearest statement yet of what the studio’s manifesto projects are actually for: not a showcase for new furniture, but a genuine argument about matter, built with the same care an arcanist once gave a formula worth keeping secret.