In the hushed cloisters of Chiostri di San Simpliciano, Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters isn’t a mere exhibition, it’s a quiet meditation on material, memory, and time. Curated by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and his interdisciplinary studio 2050+, the show reimagines one of the House’s most iconic design elements, bamboo, not as an accessory, but as a storyteller.
Among the international line-up of designers, architects, and artists, Palestinian artist and architect Dima Srouji (Instagram) offers something unexpectedly tender: Hybrid Exhalations, a series of sculptural works that merge found bamboo baskets with hand-blown glass vessels, forming fragile, lyrical hybrids. They look like breathing organisms mid-transformation—part object, part memory, part ghost. “I approached this project as a conversation between two materials and two traditions,” Srouji tells me. “One fast, fluid, and intuitive, glass, and the other slow, meditative, methodical, bamboo. They speak to one another in silence, and I get to listen in.”
Dima Srouji is based between London and the West Bank and began by collecting bamboo baskets from across the globe, Japan, the Balkans, the US, each one carrying the anonymous fingerprint of its maker. The glass, however, was made by hand in Jaba’, a village nestled between Ramallah and Jerusalem, by the Twam family, one of the last remaining Palestinian glassblowing families. She gave them no sketches or designs. “They were blowing into the void, literally,” she says, smiling. “They had no idea what the bamboo looked like. That lack of control introduced something beautiful, anticipation, chance, tension.”
Once the glass pieces arrived in her London studio, something alchemical happened. The meeting between the spontaneous glass forms and the rigid, timeworn bamboo yielded what Srouji calls “a third language.” A new creature emerged, delicate yet grounded, abstract but rooted in heritage. “Each sculpture is a carrier—of breath, of memory, of unknown hands,” she says. “The glass holds the breath of the artisan; the bamboo, the time of the weaver. They’re vessels, yes, but they’re also exhalations. They’re alive.”
The dialogue between fragility and resilience—two words never far from the Palestinian condition, is quietly embedded in every curve. Dima Srouji isn’t simply blending materials; she’s threading together generations of craft, linking anonymous artisans across continents with the endangered traditions of her homeland. “Bamboo reminds me of patience. It holds a kind of slowness that we don’t allow ourselves anymore,” she says. “Pairing it with the urgency of glass felt like staging an encounter between two different ways of being in the world. And somehow, they fit.”
The most compelling aspect of Hybrid Exhalations is its embrace of the in-between. These objects resist easy classification—they’re not quite functional, not quite decorative, not quite abstract. They’re carriers of contradiction, like the woven bags Srouji references when describing the concept behind the pieces: containers of private space, moving through the public world. “There’s this idea that a bag or a basket holds something deeply personal. You carry it with you, but others only see the surface,” she says. “That’s how we move through the world—holding our inner landscapes while negotiating how much we expose.”
For Gucci, Bamboo Encounters is a celebration of legacy, marking the evolution of the House’s bamboo-handled bags from the 1940s to a 21st century symbol of creative reinvention. But through Srouji’s eyes, it becomes something far more intimate. Her work refuses to let us forget the human labour behind beauty, the politics behind craft, the silence behind breath.
And in a city as fast-paced and polished as Milan during design week, that refusal feels radical.
Gucci | Bamboo Encounters runs from April 8–13, 2025, at Chiostri di San Simpliciano, Milan. The exhibition also features works by Anton Alvarez, Kite Club, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Laurids Gallée, Sisan Lee, and The Back Studio. Public talks take place April 8–10.
For more stories of art and culture, like this interview with Dima Srouji, visit our dedicated archives.
