In the baroque courtyard of Palazzo Litta, Lina Ghotmeh does not insert an object; she stages a condition. Metamorphosis in Motion, commissioned by Mosca Partners for its annual Variations exhibition, reads less as installation than as spatial hypothesis: what if the courtyard were no longer a void to cross, but a field to inhabit?

Rendered in a saturated rose, the work unfolds as a porous labyrinth — not the claustrophobic maze of myth, but a calibrated sequence of thresholds, apertures, and pauses. Curved partitions define rooms without ceilings; monolithic benches emerge as both sculpture and civic device. The geometry is soft, yet deliberate. Movement becomes choreography.

Ghotmeh’s practice has long operated at the intersection of archaeology and futurity — from the Bahrain Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka to the forthcoming transformation of the British Museum’s Western Range. Here, in Milan, she engages the historical intelligence of the courtyard itself: a typology designed to mediate between street and interior, public and private, spectacle and retreat. Rather than compete with its baroque envelope, she overlays it with a contemporary script.

The project’s chromatic intensity is strategic. During the visual saturation of design week, the installation functions as a decompression chamber — a place to sit, to look sideways, to encounter others obliquely. Each turn recalibrates perspective; each aperture frames fragments of façade and sky. Architecture becomes temporal, activated by use.

If previous interventions at Palazzo Litta treated the courtyard as scenography, Ghotmeh reframes it as commons. Metamorphosis in Motion proposes that transformation is not a formal gesture but a collective act — one that unfolds, quite literally, step by step.