The wonderfully contradictory part: a company that has never seen itself as political brings Ai Weiwei into the house in 2026. He is himself a refugee — out of China ten years ago, now living in Portugal, with only one brief, careful visit to Beijing in December 2025. Of all people, him, whose own tradition slipped away through flight, meets a house that never lost its own.
Silk carries origin in its thread, without claiming it. What once travelled the Silk Road from China to Venice now weaves this unlikely collaboration anew.
They call the joint installation for Milan Design Week "About Silk": the first design is a lampas of pure silk, 9,600 warp threads in deep red and gold, five wefts at 130 picks per centimetre, near-photographic sharpness in the weave. Woven in: surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains, the Twitter logo. The second design, "Finger," is woven double-sided, shifting colour from red to orange depending on which side you view it from — the middle finger (we know the symbolism, right?) stays the middle finger from every angle.
Rubelli's clientele are architects, museums, private collectors — not mass producers. Would a design like this ever make it to the masses? The few well-off people who believe they're supporting art have one chance: they could carry Rubelli's act of defiant experimentation out into the world.
I see closeness to Dada here: in a deliberate act that delicately slips free of "we've always done it this way."