A cause of the pollution fireflies are disappearing from marshes, fields and forests, leaving summer nights a little darker and less magical.

Within the blooming garden of Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, one can still experience a similar luminous beauty created by Issey Miyake‘s IN-EI lamps. The work of the Japanese fashion designer is featured at the Fondation Cartier, together with selected internationally reputed artists, in the exhibition Mémoires Vives, which celebrates the 30 year anniversary of the faundation. Reminding of courious origami insects and snails in their organic shapes, the lamps mingle with the shadows of the rich fauna like faded stars. Also the movements of the living creatures is somewhat recalled by the air mechanism that actually makes the lamps’ body constricting and expanding through time as if they were alive. The fabric at the basis of the entire collection, designed in collaboration with Miyake‘s Reality Lab team and produced together with Artemide, is a recycled material – a regenerated fibre obtained from PET bottles produced by means of innovative techniques – that boasts interesting light-diffusion properties while ensuring sustainability. As Miyake‘s textiles always went beyond the flat two-dimensional standards by combying the latest tech innovations with craftmanship, the lamps have a particular three-dimensional design inspired by Jun Mitani‘s mathematical formulas. Paradoxically beautiful during daylight and mysterious at night, the lamps recently won the prestigious Golden Compass for their essential and organic yet poetic design.

Miyake‘s soubtle artistic mind grasps something unreacheable as the light through functional and bright sculptures of shadow, bringing back to the cities the magic of fireflies.