The collaboration with Celeste Gaia perfectly represents the vision of Arbos: bringing together art and sustainability to create objects and projects capable of generating emotion and awareness.
“What do you want to protect?” is the title of the new editorial publication born from the collaboration between Arbos and artist and designer Celeste Gaia, founder of the artistic project Senzaquadro. A simple question capable of opening entire worlds.
It is a work that was not created to provide answers, but to create a space for listening, reflection, and awareness.
In a time that moves relentlessly fast, where everything seems to be consumed too quickly — relationships, thoughts, even emotions — this publication invites us to pause. To ask ourselves what truly matters. What are the things we do not want to lose? What do we wish to save from the haste, neglect, and distraction of a society that often seems to have lost its sense of direction?
For Arbos, this project represents much more than a simple artistic collaboration. It is a human and cultural manifesto, a meeting point between art and sustainability that speaks about the need to build a world more centered around people, where individuals can rediscover the value of relationships, fragility, listening, and authentic beauty.
An artistic experiment born from dialogue
The publication gathers the thoughts that emerged during a participatory artistic experiment created by Celeste Gaia during Fuorisalone 2025. Within the installation “Wrap your Future”, visitors were invited to answer a question that was both deeply intimate and universal: What do you want to protect?
The anonymous responses were placed inside a “Dream Box” created from reclaimed materials: discarded packaging, recycled MDF, and recovered plexiglass.
What emerged was an extraordinary emotional mosaic.
Some want to protect love.
Some, peace.
Some, their inner child.
Others, poetry, the sea, nature, or freedom of expression.
And some simply want to protect the people they love.
Page after page, a fragile yet deeply vibrant humanity emerges. A collection of desires, fears, hopes, and sensitivities that offers an authentic portrait of our time.
As Valentina Lonati writes in the preface:
“In a world collapsing before our eyes, what we want to protect are the essential things — the things that unite us.”
And perhaps this is the deepest heart of the project: reminding us that, beneath our differences, we all share the same fundamental human needs.
Celeste Gaia and the beauty born from transformation
The collaboration with Celeste Gaia was born naturally within the cultural and artistic journey that Arbos has been pursuing for years.
Designer, photographer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist, Celeste Gaia gave life during the lockdown to the project Senzaquadro: an artistic exploration that transforms discarded materials and packaging waste into unique works of art, where matter, words, and emotions intertwine.
IHer work begins with a reflection that is both simple and powerful: every day we produce enormous amounts of waste almost without realizing it. Yet even what is discarded can be reborn, acquire new meaning, and become a bearer of beauty and memory.
In the works of Senzaquadro, imperfection is not hidden, but celebrated. The folds of paper, worn surfaces, and marks left by time become an integral part of the narrative.
It is a vision deeply aligned with the world of Arbos.
For Arbos, recycled materials have never been simply a production choice, but a cultural statement. It means believing that things can have a second life. That sustainability should never have to give up poetry, aesthetic research, or emotion.
When art becomes part of everyday life
“What Do You Want to Protect?” is part of the cultural project “Il fare dell’arte” (“The Making of Art”), through which Arbos collaborates with artists, illustrators, and designers to bring art beyond its traditional spaces and make it alive, accessible, and part of everyday life.
For Arbos, an object is never just an object.
A notebook can become a story.
A cover can become a message.
A material can become both a political and poetic gesture.
In this continuous dialogue between art and design, the object becomes a bridge:
between those who create and those who use,
between thought and experience,
between aesthetics and function.
Because we believe that beauty still has the power to slow our gaze and awaken awareness.
And perhaps today we need that more than ever.
A conversation about what truly matters
The publication will be presented on June 5th at 7:00 PM at Libreria Verso in Milan.
The event will be moderated by journalist Valentina Lonati, in conversation with Celeste Gaia and Sergio Paolin.
It will be an open moment of dialogue and reflection on the project, on the relationship between art and sustainability, and on the need — now more than ever — to return to questioning what we truly want to protect.
Because perhaps the most important question is not simply what we want to save.
But rather what kind of world we want to build around the things we love.
