ALMA WATER installation by Sara Ricciardi – All photos are courtesy of 5Vie.

Design. In Milan, Sara Ricciardi unveiled ALMA WATER — an immersive sensory environment that drew visitors “into the liquid heart of Costa Smeralda.” Woven from moving veils, layered turquoise hues and carefully composed sound, the sonic pavilion is, in Ricciardi’s own words, “a tribute to Sardinia, to its primordial and sacred dimension, to the ancestral relationship between body and water, where everything is generated.” It’s the kind of installation that doesn’t just ask you to look — it asks you to feel.

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Sara Ricciardi dances between the waves of the ALMA WATER installation.

That emotional pull is no accident. The title ALMA WATER is a quiet reworking of the Latin alma mater — “nourishing mother” — reframing the sea itself as a maternal womb. Large silk forms billow and swell in continuous motion, their turquoise fabric suspended and animated by gentle currents of air, rippling like a living sea surface. The result is something between choreography and architecture: fluid, enveloping, and surprisingly intimate.

Ricciardi’s choice of marine hues goes beyond the obvious reference to water. The palette was selected equally for its therapeutic emotional resonance — a chromatic state of calm as much as a visual one. As the silken sails flutter and shift, plays of light move across the space in slow, wave-like rhythms, folding visitors into a soothing, almost meditative embrace.

Nestled within this sea of fabric, ALMA WATER offered something more tactile: the drums of the sea — site-specific participatory instruments inviting visitors to become composers. Each drum housed tiny marbles within a rotating transparent disc; when tilted, they produced deep resonances and vibrations reminiscent of waves breaking and withdrawing along a shoreline. There was something quietly poetic about it. “Each individual action contributes to a shared composition, as in the natural landscape, where every element plays a part in the harmony of the whole,” notes Ricciardi — and standing there, you believed it.

Commissioned by Cipnes Gallura & Regione Sardegna for Sardegna Blu Design, and produced by 5Vie Design District with the contribution of engineer Alberto Sanna, ALMA WATER found a fittingly atmospheric home at the Cavallerizze, within Milan’s Museum of Science and Technology. The grandeur of the venue only added to the work’s sense of scale and stillness.

Some installations linger in memory long after the fair closes. ALMA WATER is one of them — a reminder that design, at its finest, can move us as quietly and completely as water itself.

All photos are courtesy of 5Vie.

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