For the first edition of ENTRATE, a multi-year design programme that intends to rethink the MAXXI museum’s lobby as a place for promoting and sharing contemporary creativity, Spanish designer Nacho Carbonell has transformed the entrance hall into a visionary landscape, dominated by a striking seven-metre-tall tree. Beneath its branches, which are woven with fishing nets, and an inhabitable space emerges. This welcoming environment is filled with objects and furnishings where visitors can pause, observe, and imagine.

At the core of Carbonell’s practice is a recurring and intimate theme: personal memory. The designer’s creative process is characterized by an invisible thread that binds together the materials, gestures, and forms, drawing upon the natural landscapes of his childhood. For Carbonell, memory is not a static repository of recollections; rather, it is a dynamic instrument for design. This concept engages with reality, allows for deconstruction, and undergoes continuous regeneration. As with memory itself, which is layered with images and emotions, the artist’s creative process intertwines nature and artifice, handcraft and industrial fabrication, in a fluid dialogue between past and present, matter and vision.

Memory, in practice is an evocative reconstruction of a space inspired by the places of Carbonell’s youth, spent between the garden of his family home and the sea surrounding Valencia. The architectural form is realized through the use of materials that evoke memory, employing experimental building techniques developed by the designer over time.