Anatomy of the Eternal Present
LATERAL VIEWS
We live in a present that never seems to end. Social media has installed in our daily lives a loop with no way out: stories that vanish in twenty-four hours, trends that last less than a weekend, campaigns that are born with an expiration date already printed on them. There is no longer a difference between event and routine, everything is programmed to appear “new” and to be consumed immediately. It is the great illusion of our time, the eternity of the present, a constant flow that promises intensity but ultimately leaves us exhausted and bored.
Fashion has become the perfect laboratory for this rhythm: drop after drop, endless collaborations, collections piling up until they become white noise. Marketing is no different: “act now”, “last chance”, “one day only”. Every brand today speaks the language of urgency, but how many of those words really last?
The result is a culture that has turned novelty into routine, the unprecedented into déjà-vu.
The new feels already seen because it is born ready to be replaced. Novelty, instead of opening scenarios, repeats itself like a formula: it copies itself, is consumed and starts over, leaving only the impression of movement. The eternal present is the cultural condition we move in: a compression that flattens memory and future into a continuous instant, omnipresent and already old.
LDF believes change is possible. This is why we look to those, in other fields, who work to crack the glossy surface of the present. Their works open breaches, they remind us that time is not suspended but living matter to be transformed.
Copenaghen Architecture Biennale 2025 / Slow Down
At the Copenhagen Architecture Biennale 2025, which will take place from September 18 to October 19, the chosen theme is Slow Down.
Not a nostalgic slogan, but a political and design position, the Biennale invites participants to rethink the frantic pace of contemporary life and its impact on the built environment. As the world faces the consequences of the “Great Acceleration”, marked by unprecedented growth in population, energy use and resource consumption, the Biennale seeks to explore how architecture can contribute to a “Great Deceleration”. This means imagining spaces that promote sustainability, longevity and a conscious relationship with what surrounds us.
In this context we find projects such as Barn Again: born from the collaboration between designer Tom Svilans and London-based THISS Studio, it reinterprets the traditional Norwegian barn, dismantled and rebuilt with reclaimed wood, assembled through a dialogue between traditional knowledge and contemporary technologies. Every beam carries its own time, every knot tells a story. The result is an architecture that does not erase the past to generate novelty, but grafts it to give shape to something alive.
Barn Again / Tom Svilans & THISS Studio / 2025Copenhagen Architecture Forum
Inside Out, Downside Up by emerging duo Slaatto Morsbøl (Thelma Slaatto and Cecilie Morsbøl), transforms found and reused elements into a pavilion that invites sensory engagement and contemplation. A pavilion built like a patchwork of discarded materials, bricks, pipes, forgotten woods, reassembled into a sensory refuge. Not a spectacle to be photographed and archived, but a space to be crossed slowly, listening to sounds, touching surfaces, breathing the material.
Inside Out, Downside Up Pavilion / Slaatto Morsbø / 2025Copenhagen Architecture Forum
The French Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, instead, opened the exhibition with a name capable of piercing the heart of the eternal present: Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon. A title that flows like a visionary poem. It is an immersive work, made of soundscapes, liquefied images and oceanic tensions.
French Pavillon at Venice Art Biennale / Julien Creuzet / Attila cataract your source at the
feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon
Julien Creuzet, a Franco-Caribbean artist, has transformed the space into a total work. Creuzet is capable of building a liquid and dense world, the opposite of the gaseous and hyper-fragmented one in which we seem to live. His installation appears suspended in time, there is no linear path but a liquefied world: soundscapes that wrap around you, grainy and visionary images projected like mirages, sculptural fragments oscillating between mythology and science fiction.
Creuzet does not stage, he composes an ecosystem. His material is time: oceans that expand, bodies that become architecture, colonial memories resurfacing like wrecks.
French Pavillon at Venice Art Biennale / Julien Creuzet / Attila cataract your source at the
feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon
Finally, we highlight the work of Milanese designer David Dolcini, who with TIMEMADE subverts the relationship with time and objects. TIMEMADE is a research project launched in 2020 during the pandemic, born as a personal journey free from design constraints and guided by the simple pleasure of making with one’s hands. At its center is wood, a living and changing material that reflects the very nature of time and recalls the designer’s family heritage in woodworking.
Davide Dolcini / TIMEMADE
Inspired by diverse worlds, from botanical grafts to Japanese architecture and Chinese ink painting, Dolcini has developed an aesthetic language that considers time not only as a process of research and creation, but as a material of design itself. Every piece of TIMEMADE is a micro-architecture that evolves continuously through context and human use: it is never finished, but transforms with time, returning fluidity and ever new meanings. In a historical moment where speed has become an essential variable for industrial processes, Dolcini instead celebrates a culture of making based on respect for time, material and nature.
Davide Dolcini / TIMEMADE
These three gestures are not marginal notes, they are warnings. Signals that tell us another path is possible, and necessary. That new ideas and new ways of inhabiting the world can come from the most diverse fields, if only we learn to listen.
So the question is: what do we want to do, as designers, as communicators, as makers?
At LDF, our choice is clear: we are not interested in multiplying noise, we want to build meaning. We are not interested in novelty as habit, we are interested in the again: what returns, what grows, what changes each time.
For us, design means orchestrating relationships, not producing output.
It means treating time as a material, not as an enemy. It means enjoying complexity, getting our hands dirty with matter, discovering that true intensity does not lie in chasing the trend, but in the deeper pleasure of making.