At Marsèll Milano Spiga, the ceiling has become a landscape of ambiguity. Hovering above the precise architecture of the Via della Spiga flagship, a multitude of pale, pointed forms creates an uncanny new horizon. They seem engineered for a purpose, yet that purpose remains tantalizingly out of reach. This is Soft Machine, the site-specific installation by textile artist Claire Duport and the latest chapter of Marsèll’s Spazio program.
On view in Milan from September 24 through October 30, 2026, Soft Machine approaches industrial production through the sensual, vulnerable vocabulary of textile. Duport takes the gestures associated with manufacturing—pressure, repetition, stretching, molding, cutting, and puncturing—and removes the recognizable product that would ordinarily emerge from them. What remains is an atmospheric choreography of forms suspended somewhere between object and process.
Marsèll – Soft Machine – Claire Duport – photo credit: Claudia Zalla
From a distance, the installation appears harder than it is. The sculptures’ pointed profiles suggest metal or another rigid industrial material. Closer inspection overturns that expectation. Each form is constructed from translucent fabric stretched into a delicate three-dimensional volume. Light encounters surfaces that initially appear severe, revealing objects whose visual sharpness is countered by their physical fragility.
That contradiction gives Soft Machine its peculiar magnetism. Duport’s repeated shapes can evoke industrial components, anatomical fragments, or unfamiliar instruments whose functions have somehow been forgotten. Their multiplication carries the cadence of a production line, yet there is no machine in sight and no conventional commodity waiting at its end. Repetition gradually makes the familiar strange, asking the eye to search for an explanation while deliberately withholding one.
The installation was conceived specifically for Marsèll’s Via della Spiga space and enters into a close dialogue with its refined architecture. Instead of overwhelming the interior, Duport introduces a subtle instability. The sculptures hover overhead with an almost spectral lightness, disrupting expectations of weight, hardness, and function while allowing the surrounding space to remain visible.
The color palette strengthens that relationship. Tones developed for Marsèll’s latest collection also appear within the installation, placing the sculptures and footwear within a shared visual atmosphere. Art, fashion, material, and architecture begin to occupy the same field while retaining their individual identities.
The encounter feels particularly fitting within Marsèll’s wider creative language. For more than two decades, the Italian brand has explored the relationship between design, craftsmanship, and material through handmade leather footwear and accessories produced in Italy. Its minimal aesthetic is closely connected to traditional techniques, experimentation, and an ongoing investigation of form.
Spazio extends that curiosity into contemporary culture. The program periodically invites artists, designers, and curators to create site-specific interventions for the Marsèll flagship on Via della Spiga, transforming the store into an evolving setting for artistic exchange. Each project begins with a conversation between the space and the creative figure invited to interpret it.
For Duport, textile carries associations extending far beyond decoration. Her artistic practice moves between embroidery, quilting, and three-dimensional installation. Following a background in fashion editorial, she expanded her work through illustration and collaborations with brands and fashion publications before developing a deeper artistic investigation centered on textile.
Fabric becomes almost bodily within that practice. Its softness can suggest comfort and intimacy, yet its vulnerability can introduce unease. Domestic familiarity is allowed to acquire a sharper psychological edge, and materials conventionally associated with warmth become capable of producing tension.
That sensibility runs throughout Soft Machine. Its title captures the productive friction at the heart of the installation: softness encounters the language of machinery, while translucent fabric assumes silhouettes that appear capable of force. Duport leaves these sensations unresolved. Seduction, apprehension, pleasure, and vulnerability inhabit the same visual territory, encouraging visitors to remain within uncertainty rather than hurry toward a definitive interpretation.
There is something distinctly physical about encountering the installation overhead. Looking upward alters the conventional relationship between visitor and artwork. The suspended forms command the room while appearing almost impossibly light. Their repetition establishes a rhythm across the ceiling, making the architecture part of the composition and turning movement through the flagship into an essential element of the experience.
Soft Machine also redirects attention toward a stage of design consumers rarely see: the making itself. Finished objects tend to conceal the sequences that created them. Here, Duport brings those invisible actions into imaginative focus. Pressure, cutting, stretching, molding, and repetition become subjects in their own right, separated from the practical result they would ordinarily serve.
The machinery remains absent, yet its gestures seem to linger throughout the room. What survives is the memory of production: an abstract choreography stripped of an obvious function. In Duport’s hands, process becomes atmosphere.
The installation also explores the uneasy territory between recognition and instinct. A shape may seem familiar for a moment before slipping away from identification. The eye attempts to categorize it; the body may respond first. That tension gives the work its quietly provocative character, creating an experience that can feel alluring and unsettling within the same instant.
The accompanying text for Soft Machine is by Joel Valabrega, a curator based in Porto and Milan. Valabrega curated the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 60th International Venice Biennale in 2024 and the Present Future section of Artissima in 2024 and 2025, with the 2026 edition upcoming in November. After serving as Curator of Performance and Moving Image at Mudam – Museum of Modern Art Luxembourg from 2020 to 2024, she became Head of Programme at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2025.
For fashion, art, and design audiences in Milan this fall, Soft Machine offers an invitation to look beyond the completed object and toward the tensions embedded in its creation. Material becomes body. Repetition becomes atmosphere. Manufacturing is transformed into an abstract visual language.
Soft Machine opened with an event on September 23, 2026. The installation is on view through October 30, 2026, at Marsèll Milano Spiga, Via della Spiga 42, Milan.
