The exhibition “From Legacy to the Future. Restoration as a Design Project” is currently underway at the TCDC Thailand Creative & Design Center in Bangkok, as part of Bangkok Design Week 2026. The project leads the public to reflect on the centrality of restoration, a recognized excellence of Italian know-how, conceived as a practice of innovation, protection, and sustainability, aimed at enhancing cultural heritage, understood primarily as its socialization and openness to the community.
The heart of the project is dedicated to the restoration of Michelangelo’s “River God”, a full-scale clay model created between 1524 and 1526 for the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. As the artist’s only surviving model, the work was the subject of a complex restoration project begun in 2014 by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, which integrated diagnostic surveys and chemical-physical analyses to restore legibility to this fragile and extraordinary artifact.
The exhibition in Bangkok features a resin copy of the original, displayed in a setting that symbolically evokes the dialogue between water and time. The exhibition layout is by P&M Palterer Medardi Architecture, and the installation was created in Bangkok by Distortion Studio.
The exhibition is part of the multidisciplinary program “Italia Reloaded. Tradizione, estetica e innovazione italiana tra gusto e memoria (Italy Reloaded. Italian Tradition, Aesthetics, and Innovation between Taste and Memory)” developed by the Italian Cultural Institute in Bangkok in collaboration with the local Embassy. The exhibition won the fourth competition “Capitali della creatività italiana nel mondo” (Capitals of Italian Creativity in the World), awarded by an inter-Ministerial Commission (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Business and Made in Italy).
