Up a short flight of ochre stone steps in Milan’s Brera district, a door opens to Casa Tacchini, the brand’s apartment in Largo Treves, where walls are the colour of dark chocolate, honey-toned sofas sink link dunes, a vaulted ceiling of whitewashed brick is softened by pleated, champagne-coloured curtains. This autumn, amongst the travertine plinths and lacquered timber, something far older has moved in.
It arrives by way of the inaugural Premio Tacchini, created with Fondazione Officine Saffi and presented at the sixth Officine Saffi Award, the international ceramics biennale titled Forms of Belonging. From 28 finalists, chosen from more than 1,000 applications across 41 countries, Tacchini selected the Spanish-Equatoguinean artist Bisila Noha. The prize is an exhibition at Casa Tacchini, curated by the foundation and on view until 13 November.
It is hard to imagine a more fitting guest. Noha, a London-based ceramicist, writer and researcher born in 1988, came to clay for its directness. “I love the fact that it is a direct conversation with the material,” she told me in an interview for our sister magazine Port in 2023. “The way my fingers are dealing with the clay and shaping it is very relaxing and meditative.” Only later did the history seep in – the sense that this humble has, for millennia, built our walls and held our water. “It is such an integral part of our survival.”
In the show, tall-necked vessels rise with chalky white lips that bleed downwards into smoke, soot and burnt umber, their surfaces looking like tumultuous weather peered at from a plane window. Elsewhere, a charcoal stool stands on stout, ribbed legs; in another, which is washed in a cream colour, it looks pressed and folded like dough; while another sees a greyish-black vessel pinched into a creased, bird-like profile. The work is tender, textural and undeniably beautiful – merging craft with themes of identity and social activism, which Noha has become known for.
Noha began by using her practice to affirm her Spanishness, drawing on the water vessels of the Mediterranean. Then, in 2020, she started working with clay brought from the Baney, the village of Bioko island in Equatorial Guinea where her father was born. “Through the process of making this with clay, I’ve connected to my African side,” she told me for Port. “It’s been an interesting but also very deep and transformational process.” When she returned to Baney in 2023, the feeling was one of homecoming: “for so many years I had been dealing with and touching the land.”
While all of her pieces carry a particular weight to them, there are the two-legged vessels which have become a signature. Created in 2020 to represent her mixed-race identity and connection to her Spanish-Equatoguinean heritage, the vessels work as a metaphor and a way of acknowledging the women who have been overlooked in the history of ceramics. During the creative process, she discovered that this two-legged shape was first pioneered in the 1970s by Kouame Kakahá, a renowned Baoulé potter from Tanou Sakassaou in the Ivory Coast. In 2023, she travelled to find her. The vessels were exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield and collected by institutions like the Crafts Council Collections Online and the High Museum of Art, while her wider body of work now sits in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Crafts Council, National Museums of Scotland and Nottingham Castle.
Tacchini was founded in 1967 by Antonio Tacchini as a carpentry workshop in Seveso, in the Brianza, and the company has grown into a benchmark of Italian furniture-making without ever quite losing the sawdust. Today, Giusi Tacchini, its CEO and creative director, treats design history as a dig site, unearthing forgotten pieces and letting their stories steer what comes next. The most telling is the Babela chair, drawn by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in 1958 and relaunched in 2010. That patience with the past, and with materials, is the common ground here.
“When we imagined Casa Tacchini, we thought of a place that could go beyond presenting our products: a domestic space capable of welcoming different stories, people and languages,” says Giusi Tacchini. “The collaboration with Fondazione Officine Saffi in creating the Premio Tacchini stems precisely from the desire to bring design into dialogue with other forms of creative expression, recognising the material as a common element. Likewise, we were struck by Bisila’s ability to transform ceramics into storytelling, memory and identity.”
Noha says of the collaboration, “With Tacchini, I share a deep respect for the essence, beauty and voice of materials. I create works that, while rooted in the stories and traditions from which they originate, are innovative and deeply personal. They are forms that I use as a language to tell stories in which we can all recognise ourselves. Through my practice, I seek to highlight the power of art and craft to create connections and bring people closer together; for this reason, it is particularly inspiring to collaborate with a brand that fully understands and shares this vision.”
Premio Tacchini – Bisila Noha is at Casa Tacchini, Largo Treves 5, Milan, until 13 November 2026