Dust motes scattered across the galaxy—the essential matter that congealed over millennia and across lightyears—to form star systems, planets and the metal of your favourite lampshade. It’s a dizzying perspective, elemental but all-encompassing, to think of the world around us as formed from this ancient genesis. It is from this place, both macroscopic in its perspective and microscopic in its resolution, that the Copenhagen-based gallery Etage Projects positions its latest exhibition, Light carries information from the stars to the cells in our bodies. Displaying a series of lighting designs by Swedish design practice studio vit, the show, on view from August 22 – October 25, 2025, attempts to give form to the invisible matter that constitutes our inner worlds, a bridge to the universal. ‘The cells in our bodies come from exploded stars,’ mentions part of the wall text to be read in parallel to the presented objects here.

The amorphous, meteor-like artefacts on display are crafted in cast aluminium, inspired by the tempestuous phenomenon that is outer space. While the symbolic representation of the universe’s nebulous matter serves as material inspiration, the designers insist there is something more allegorical to be read under the shiny metal surface of the lamps and pendant lights. By themselves, the pieces by the London-based studio evoke that very distinct image, of space rocks floating aimlessly in the cosmic latte of the unknown beyond, as ‘Two dying stars held together with gravitation’.

Helena Jonasson and Veronica Dagnert, founders and partners of studio vit, invite visitors not only to consider the objects individually, but as part of a larger constellation. With the works, the Swedish studio seems to draw a thread from a design practice that is concerned with light and materiality to bring forth a relationship with that utterance which set the universe in motion. Within Etage Projects, the sculptural designs are arranged as if suspended in time, akin to astral matter drifting apart or coming together after an explosion.

As the exhibition text elaborates, the various product designs are indeed meant to be read as parts of a whole, as ‘A brief moment in time materialised’. They seem to dance across the gallery, particularly the suspended lighting fixtures. That said, there is something detached in the arrangement of these artefacts. If the goal for the product designers was to fill the gallery space with light, the result feels somewhat underwhelming.

The gallery itself—a bare white cube—seems to assert its own emptiness, the unoccupied space becoming part of the composition. Apart from uplifting the contemporary designs with a lofty metaphorical device, a tendency most designers could be accused of possessing, the show doubles down on the poesies of the whole affair with its use of text. Strewn across the blank gallery walls are fragments of a poem that is an exclusive part of Light carries information from the stars to the cells in our bodies. These fragments replace gallery text, dislodging the idea of the design exhibition as a place for visitors to simply discover new works with an experience of the designers’ interpretation of light.

In this, studio vit is perhaps best suited for such a figurative showcase. While the designs on display, in their ‘imperfect’ state, seem to deviate from the clean visual language of the studio’s other work, the synthesis between the intangible and tangible is part and parcel of the studio’s design philosophy. As the practice notes on their website, “Designs are made to purposefully provoke gentle reaction, by challenging expectations of scale and use or by creating subtle tensions between forms and materials.” In this case, the text is as much material by which ‘design’ is formed and understood as the more mundane aluminium by which it is shaped.

It’s an interesting provocation, pitting writing as matter against the materiality of design. What truly constitutes the perception of a designed object? Is it our associations with it, with memory, emotion or something more cerebral? Or is it the matter that has coalesced over millennia to form the raw material that makes up our lives? Can writing arise from thin air when, in fact, the writer has not engaged with the materiality in question? How else might we approach writing about design if not as deeply entangled with the external world—the macro (resources, culture, politics) mirroring the micro (memory, identity). It’s a philosophical quandary we face every day. The showcase certainly did not set out with the goal to engender such reflection, but for an exhibition concerned with the matter of the universe, such universally specific pondering is only expected.

The exhibition ‘Light carries information from the stars to the cells in our bodies’ is on view from August 22 – October 25, 2025, at Etage Projects, Copenhagen, Denmark.