At Palazzo Migazzi in Cogolo di Peio, designer Alessio Ramundo has spent five years collecting the obsolete tools of a valley’s linen and woodworking trades — and is exhibiting them not as agricultural relics, but as objects whose precision rivals anything produced by a named designer. Utensili Obliati (“Forgotten Tools”), on view through 27 September 2026, gathers original tools from Val di Peio and Val di Sole tied to trades that industrialization rendered obsolete by the mid-twentieth century. The exhibition argues that what’s actually at risk isn’t the tools themselves, but the intangible cultural heritage behind them — a practical intelligence that can’t be passed down through books or archives, only through repeated gesture.
Five years of fieldwork underpin the show. Milan-based Alessio Ramundo, who was born and raised in Val di Peio before studying product design at NABA Milan, spent that time tracking down and documenting the surviving tools of the valley’s historic linen and woodworking trades — a body of objects that industrial processes had progressively rendered invisible, and that risked disappearing from memory along with the people who used them.
Two mirrored rooms organize the exhibition path. Palazzo Migazzi’s halls are split into complementary spaces, each devoted to one of the valley’s two defining material cycles — linen and wood — allowing the two production systems to be read side by side rather than as isolated case studies.
Linen, from seed to spinning fills the first room, documenting the full linen production cycle that structured rural and social life in the valley until the mid-twentieth century. The objects on display trace a complex technical chain, from cultivation of the raw fiber through to spinning — a sequence of specialized tools that, taken together, mapped an entire seasonal rhythm of work.
Wood, from forest to workshop occupies the second room, guiding visitors from forest labor to the precision of workshop carpentry. The sequence shows how raw timber was transformed, through interlocking sets of skills, into furniture, structural elements, and domestic tools — a visual narrative of material moving from landscape to object.
An exhibition design that steps back ties the two rooms together. Ramundo, who also designed the display architecture, built an essential wooden support structure intended to accompany the objects without ever overshadowing them, leaving traces of use and the material itself to speak directly to visitors rather than filtering the tools through interpretive staging.
Design without an author is how Ramundo frames the collection’s real value. “What struck me most, over five years of research, wasn’t just the technical complexity of these tools, but their formal quality,” he said. “These are objects that are beautiful in the most precise sense of the word: form and function coincide with a precision that leaves nothing to chance. It is a design born of practical experience, refined over time, without an author.”
A valley reconsidered is the broader ambition behind the show. “I’m interested in reflecting on how Val di Peio and Val di Sole can present themselves today: not only as tourist destinations, but as territories capable of preserving a unique culture of making,” Ramundo said. The stakes are practical as much as symbolic — the artisans of Trentino still working in the valley increasingly struggle to find younger people willing to carry the trades forward, leaving a generations-long culture of making at risk of interruption.
Elsewhere, the same question about handmade knowledge is surfacing in very different contexts. At London’s Barbican, Colombian artist Delcy Morelos built her earthwork origo from 30 tonnes of soil applied entirely by hand, insisting — as she put it — on the irreducible value of the handmade against a backdrop of increasing digital fabrication. Utensili Obliatimakes a related argument from the opposite direction: rather than a single artist’s gesture, it’s the accumulated, anonymous authorship of an entire valley across generations.
A tool worn smooth by decades of hands is displayed under the exhibition’s spare wooden supports — one spinning implement carrying a polish no finish could replicate, and the only signature the valley’s linen trade ever left behind.
Utensili Obliati by Alessio Ramundo | Where: Palazzo Migazzi, Piazza Cardinal C. Migazzi, 5, Cogolo di Peio (TN), Italy — When: 4 July – 27 September 2026