For nine years, Volvo Studio Milano has established itself as a key reference point for contemporary culture in the city, multiplying ideas through its own events and by promoting the projects of partners and artists, in constant dialogue with Milan. The Studio model focuses on largely free, accessible programming designed to encourage participation and strengthen its connection with people.
The 2026 program confirms the Studio’s role as an active player in the city’s cultural life: more than one hundred events per year transform the space into a hub for cultural production and dissemination, where artistic quality, visitors’ well-being, and local impact coexist harmoniously.
Sensory horizons: perception and innovation
The 2026 curatorial theme, Sensory Horizons, explores the limits and possibilities of the senses, the tools through which we relate to space, time, and others. Each Studio project aims to activate multiple levels of experience, creating connections between the individual, the community, and the environment.
Drawing on Volvo’s technological innovation, the Studio develops a guiding thread that transforms research on perception into an immersive cultural experience. The advanced sensory systems of Volvo vehicles, capable of integrating real-time data to enhance safety and environmental awareness, become the conceptual inspiration for a season in which art, science, and technology engage in a coherent and complementary dialogue.
The theme takes its cue from Volvo’s sensor-based safety systems, predictive capabilities, and artificial intelligence: technologies able to read, interpret, and anticipate the surrounding environment. From this extension of perception emerges a multidisciplinary cultural journey, where industrial innovation is translated into language, vision, and a space for dialogue among art, science, music, and contemporary thought.
Established collaborations
Over the years, Volvo Studio Milano has built a solid and authoritative network of cultural partners, including Triennale Milano, La Milanesiana, BAM – Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano, BASE Milano, and Ponderosa, strengthening its role as a bridge between innovation, creativity, and community.
Volvo’s connection with art, architecture and design
The first project launched is by the artist Stefano Caimi, whose work depicts landscapes that reveal themselves only when observed slowly. It is from this time of observation that LA FORMA TRATTENUTA takes shape, constructed from images created between Alpine landscapes and the urban fabric surrounding Volvo Studio Milano, in a context where greenery is an active part of a designed and complex system. Through technological tools and digital processing, Caimi breaks down and reorganizes data, images, and natural forms, translating them into essential scenarios. Technology functions as a reading device: it does not add, but makes visible biological structures, rhythms, and relationships that are normally imperceptible. The result is a landscape that is not merely represented but analyzed and reconstructed as a space of continuous relationship between nature, design, and perception. La Forma Trattenuta will be open to visitors every Saturday in the working spaces of Volvo Studio Milano until April 4, 2026. In April, on the occasion of Art and Design Week, together with Viasaterna, Volvo Studio Milano once again becomes a stage and a hub for artistic experimentation. The selected project by the Mandalaki collective (a studio founded in Milan in 2012 that explores the boundaries and intersections between design, art, and technology) opens with an immersive, site-specific light design installation through which Volvo Studio becomes, for two weeks, a vibrant space where luminous technologies are used to explore stories, forms, and new, poetic landscapes.
2026 Program – Project Selection
- Stefano Caimi – LA FORMA TRATTENUTA (January–April 2026)
Site-specific exhibit curated by Viasaterna and Rischa Paterlini - TANDEM – A Stage for Two (February–April 2026)
Emerging talents and established artists
A project by Volvo Studio Milano and BASE Milano, in collaboration with Costello’s Records - ELSEWHERE – New Sonic Horizons (February–April 2026)
A project by BASE Milano in collaboration with Le Cannibale - PLANETARIUM (February–May 2026)
Special project in collaboration with La Sinfonica Milano, Cinevan, and Marco Gerosa - VOLVO STUDIO IN SANREMO (February 2026)
Double special project on the occasion of the 76th Italian Song Festival - COMEDY STUDIO (March–May 2026)
A project curated by Ponderosa Music & Art - THE DAILY CRASH (March–September 2026)
Fashion design laboratory curated by VerySeri and Volvo Studio Milano - TURNING POINT. I BAMoff (March–October 2026)
Project curated by BAM – Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano, a project of Fondazione Riccardo Catella - ART & DESIGN WEEK – Exhibition (April 2026)
Site-specific project by the Mandalaki collective
Curated by Viasaterna and Rischa Paterlini - PIANO CITY MILANO (May 2026)
Two Piano Lessons, one concert by an emerging pianist, and three Toy Piano workshops - LA MILANESIANA (June 2026)
Site-specific project curated by Fondazione Elisabetta Sgarbi - JAM THE FUTURE – 8th Edition (September 2026)
Project by Volvo Studio Milano, JAZZMI, and Ponderosa Music & Art - JAZZMI (October–November 2026)
Project curated by JAZZMI and Ponderosa Music & Art - Esplorazioni 2026 (October–November 2026)
Project curated by Triennale Milano Teatro
