There are creative studios that make beautiful things, and then there are creative studios that make you see differently. SolidNature belongs firmly in the second category — and Il Sonno Supermarket might be the clearest proof yet of how far their thinking extends beyond the material they work with.
The premise is deceptively simple. Inside ME Milan Il Duca, in collaboration with OMA/AMO and curator Samir Bantal, SolidNature has built a supermarket. Aisles, shelving, familiar products — eggs, toast, tuna, coffee, all the objects of daily grocery ritual arranged exactly as you'd expect to find them. Except nothing here is what it appears to be. Every item is a stone replica. Permanent, weighty, cold to the touch, and completely untouchable in the way that only truly considered objects are. You recognise everything and can use nothing.
That gap — between the familiar and the immovable — is where the installation lives, and it's an extraordinarily intelligent place to build something.
What makes SolidNature exceptional isn't just the craft, though the craft is remarkable. It's the originality of their conceptual framework and their willingness to push natural stone into territory no one else is exploring. Most design studios working with premium materials stay within the safe perimeter of luxury signifiers — surfaces, furniture, architectural finishes. SolidNature keeps asking a different question: what happens when stone enters spaces and contexts it has no business being in? What does it change about how we see those spaces? What does it reveal?
Il Sonno Supermarket — the sleeping supermarket — answers that question with quiet confrontation. The installation doesn't shout its thesis. It simply replaces the disposable with the permanent and lets the discomfort settle in naturally. A culture built on speed, convenience, and the assumption that everything is replaceable comes face to face with objects that refuse all of those terms. Stone eggs that will outlast every real egg ever laid. A stone tin of tuna that will never be opened, never be consumed, never be thrown away. The supermarket's entire logic — buy, use, discard, repeat — rendered completely inoperable.
The circular thinking embedded in the production process makes the concept even sharper. Every stone piece in the installation is crafted from off-cuts of larger SolidNature projects — material that would otherwise be considered waste, recontextualised into art objects that make a direct argument for preservation over consumption. The medium and the message are completely unified. The installation doesn't talk about sustainability or value or permanence — it embodies all three simultaneously, in every piece, from the inside out.
This is what genuine creative originality looks like at the studio level. Not the originality of surface — a new colour, an unexpected texture, a fresh collaboration — but the originality of thinking that generates ideas no one else would arrive at. SolidNature could make beautiful countertops and call it a day. Instead they build sleeping supermarkets inside Milanese hotels and ask the rest of us to reckon with what we actually value.
Here, material becomes the message. And the message is one worth sitting with.