Richie Hawtin continues his longstanding creative relationship with Prada, creating a new Plastikman sound experience for Pradasphere located at Prada Galleria in Milan.
Electronic music pioneer Richie Hawtin has created a new body of work as Plastikman for Pradasphere, Milan, continuing a creative relationship with Prada that has developed across music, fashion and performance.
Rather than a single soundtrack, Hawtin has composed Plastikman material for each space across this expansive new Pradasphere exhibition, treating sound as part of the architecture and how the compositions are experienced. The soundscape unfolds as visitors move through the building, interwoven between rooms and eras. Each composition responds to its room’s theme and atmosphere, standing alone while connecting and supporting the different periods of Prada’s history, and accompanying the visitor on a journey through time and space.
“Music is an invisible force that resonates as much with our emotions as with the architecture it inhabits. For Pradasphere, the Plastikman soundscapes use subtle frequencies and rhythms, felt as much as heard, to extend Prada’s aesthetic into a sonic presence that moves with the visitor through the spaces and history of the house.” – Richie Hawtin
The project develops ideas first explored at Pradasphere II in Shanghai in 2023, which Prada described as scored throughout by Plastikman, with Hawtin creating bespoke soundscapes progressing with the movement of visitors through the exhibition. Material from that commission has now been reworked for its new architectural context in Milan.
The collaboration itself reaches further back. Since scoring five Prada runway shows from 2021, Hawtin has continued to create original music for the house, alongside Prada Extends, the music and cultural programme he conceived with Prada. First staged at Tate Modern in London, the series has since travelled to Tokyo, Miami and Bangkok, bringing together music, visual art and local creative communities.
Conceived under the direction of Miuccia Prada, Prada Galleria opens inside Milan’s historic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, bringing together eight floors of retail, hospitality, art, history and culture on the site where Fratelli Prada was founded in 1913.
Pradasphere project sits within a much longer exploration of sound, space and technology in Hawtin’s practice. Through Plastikman, he has spent decades examining how electronic sound can alter the perception of an environment, from the reduction and repetition of his recorded work to audiovisual performances and developments in digital DJing and music technology. Pradasphere takes that thinking into architecture: Plastikman, experienced as sound embedded within physical space.
