'La línea sueña' highlights lighting design as a discipline at Madrid Design Festival 2025

The ongoing Madrid Design Festival (MDF), pivoted on the common theme—of Redesigning the World—from previous editions, hosts nearly 200 activities, 20 exhibitions and more than 80 workshops and open studios during the design event. The eighth edition of the design festival, open from February 6 – March 15, 2025, in Madrid, Spain, aims to showcase the potential of design as a tool for driving dialogue and offering novel ways to look at enduring problems by "showcasing inspiring examples of creativity and responsibility towards the society and the environment".

Amid a range of events straddling disparate disciplines such as fashion, science, music, art and crafts, La línea sueña or The Line Dreams, one of the festival's main exhibitions, delves into an exploration of light, space and design. La línea sueña, curated by Javier Riera, with advice from ROOM and exhibition design by Studio Animal, brings together 70 different pieces of light art and light design by 45 creatives. Stationed at the Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa, this exhibition will remain on view until April 20, 2025.

With La línea sueña, MDF 2025 presents, for the first time in the history of the festival, a monographic festival on the relationship that exists between light and space. With a sensory experience designed to invite reflection on perception and creativity, the show features works that are at once innovative and transformative and focus on the contemporary relationship between design and light. Fittingly, the exhibition's title refers to erstwhile Swiss-German artist Paul Klee's "idea of drawing as an activity that connects the inner world and reality, a metaphor that is transferred to light as a trace in space".

"All the works gathered together stand out for their innovation and their ability to transform spaces through light, based on different ways of feeling and constructing elements designed to illuminate our surroundings. Thus, temperature, saturation and intensity are translated into emotional elements, highlighting the artistic power of light: light as an intangible element that touches us and penetrates our psychology far beyond our skin," shares Riera.

The pieces and installations within the design exhibition cover varying disciplines. From interior lighting and lamp designs to decorative light, light installations, product design and light art, the displays address both functional and aesthetic demands. All the exhibited pieces share a sense of design closely linked to architecture and landscape and a particular vision of light in which the technical and the metaphorical run parallel.

Organised around different thematic blocks, The Line Dreams focuses both on the effects that light produces and on the elements that generate, emit or diffuse it. Some of the sub-themes running within the exhibition include 'Light in the landscape', 'In praise of penumbra', 'Light, form and matter', 'Sustainable light' and 'The passing glow'. The showcases within these sections, hence, are made using a wide range of materials and bear varying styles.

Some creatives whose works are on display include Antoni Arola, Massimiliano Moro, We+, Maximilian Marchesani, Michael Anastassiades, Andreu Carulla, Mayice, Ábbatte, Marre Moerel, Eliurpi, Davide Groppi, Draga & Aurel, Josep Vila Capdevila, Jana Tothill, Héctor Serrano, Max Enrich, Eduardo Barco, Studio Élémentaires, Carlos Torrijos, María Abando Olarán, Candela Cort/LZF, Marta Pascual, Mario Ruiz, Ezequiel Nobili, Max Milá, Lucas Muñoz, Álvaro Catalán de Ocón, Sergi Pequera/Suru, Carlos Coronas, Elisa Valero, Frank Oehring and Gonzalez Haase.

At La línea sueña, one comes across 400kg alabaster lamps, luminaires made from urban waste such as polystyrene, 3D-printed lamps, and lighting designs made using recycled materials such as wool. Pieces such as the Earth, Sea and Air collection by Héctor Serrano, Álvaro Catalán de Ocón's recycled PET bottles and Andreína Raventós's cayenne petals and orange peel skin lamps, too, ascribe to sustainability. Barcelona-based Amarist Studio's Aqua Fossil collection appears to resemble the slimy shapes of sea creatures and Maximilian Marchesani's Famiglia emulates an undulating terrain. On the other hand, spatial light art by Antoni Arola, David Groppi, Josep Vila Capdevila and Massimiliano Moro transform the spaces they are stationed in.

Other displays at the exhibition include contemporary table lamps, floor lamps and wall lamps; LED screens emitting fluorescent lights; light strips arranged in the shape of abstract sculptures; lamps fitted within earthenware, porcelain, paper, brass or fishing nets; as well as the generous usage of mirrors to amplify the effect of light. Within the gallery space, these lights, shadows and textures mix, revealing new visions and inspiring, novel experiments in light.

'La línea sueña' (The Line Dreams) is on view from February 7 - April 20, 2025, at the Fernan Gomez. Cultural Center of the Villa — Madrid, Spain, as part of the Madrid Design Festival 2025.