100 Things Not to Forget by Repubblica del Design – All photos are by Repubblica del Design.
Design. Some dates don’t fade. The 25th of April — Italy’s Liberation Day, marking freedom from Nazi occupation and the collapse of the Fascist regime — is one of them. This year, it becomes both inspiration and framework for 100 Things Not To Forget, a project by Repubblica del Design that activates two World War II shelters during Milan Design Week, opening spaces that have closed to the public to a very present conversation.
Exhibition at Breda Bunker.
The premise is precise. “To open a reflection on how these spaces can be reinterpreted as new forms of contemporary refuge, also in relation to ongoing environmental and climate transformations,” explains Davide Crippa of Repubblica del Design. Conflict, climate, community — the themes feel anything but historical. 100 Things Not To Forget treats these underground spaces not as monuments to the past, but as mirrors held up to the present.
Distretti Resilienti exhibition.
The first stop is Rifugio 87 — one of Milan’s largest civilian air-raid shelters, stretching across some 1,200 square metres of thick walls, long silent corridors, and watertight doors. The architecture alone tells a story. What unfolds within it tells several more.
100 Values to Remember exhibition.
Among the highlights, the 100 Values To Remember exhibition opens that conversation with quiet force: a dispersed constellation of paper planes, each bearing a word, a principle, a trace. Fifty students pose the question to themselves and to visitors — which values are worth carrying forward? It’s a disarmingly simple premise, and a surprisingly affecting one.
Distretti Resilienti follows, mapping the resilience of Italian productive territories in the face of economic and environmental pressures. Among its threads, the Murano 3D project draws a thoughtful line between 3D printing and Venetian glassmaking — expanding a living heritage rather than replacing it.
Distretti Resilienti exhibition at Breda Bunker.
Resourcefulness, it turns out, is a thread that runs through the entire exhibition. Survival Design examines technological innovation under constraint, whilst TechnéTECA proposes something genuinely useful: a living archive of know-how that moves well beyond the conventional material library. Beginning with post-war “autarchic” materials and low-tech logic, it reaches toward the future through research developed across seven Italian universities.
TechnéTECA exhibition.
Rifugio 87 closes with Towards a Civil Lettering — a light-based installation that salvages letters and signage from disused commercial contexts, reassembling them into typographic compositions in service of civil values and human rights. The city’s visual language, reread as an act of collective memory.
Towards A Civil Lettering exhibition.
100 Things Not To Forget then descends further still — into the Breda Bunker at Parco Nord Milano, an underground space built to shelter industrial workers, its reinforced concrete and spare interiors largely intact. Here, sound, image, and testimony reconstruct the experience of the bombings, surfacing a memory that official histories have rarely prioritised. The work connects to the research of the Metropolitan Urban Ecomuseum, EUMM, and its ongoing mapping of war’s traces within the Milanese urban fabric.
To move through these spaces is to understand that 100 Things Not To Forget was never simply about the past. It’s about what we choose to carry with us.
Exhibition at Breda Bunker.
Founded in 2019, Repubblica del Design is a cultural association with a specific territorial aim: to enhance and regenerate Milan’s peripheral areas. It is located along the Lancetti–Dergano–Bovisa axis, opening up to the many “consulates” that identify with its spirit.
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Exhibition at Breda Bunker.
