Attitude 130: Nomad

“I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I cannot wish to be anything. Aside from that, I carry within me all the dreams of the world.” Invoking Fernando Pessoa to open this edition is not just a gesture of literary belonging – it’s a conceptual alignment with a sensibility that has never been more relevant. His writing, marked by restless lucidity, anticipated what defines our time: the fragmentation of the self, multiple narratives and a constant oscillation between being and becoming. Beginning. There is always a strangeness in the first gesture – an awareness that everything remains to be defined. Starting a new cycle, as editor of ATTITUDE, with the Nomad issue, is no coincidence. There is an inevitable affinity between this theme and the way I measure myself. I have always been more interested in the interval than the conclusion, the overlap rather than the synthesis, and that continuum where different versions coexist and enhance one another. Even when they remain unresolved.

In this issue, we travel through different geographies and atmospheres to encounter moments that capture the Nomad condition. In Marrakech, we discovered a city that no longer relies on exotic nostalgia, but on a new creative confidence, where artists such as Amine El Gotaibi and Eric Van Hove reinterpret Moroccan history with authenticity. In places such as Farasha Farmhouse or Riad Rosemary, we found spaces where magnificence ceases to be an excess and becomes a compass for time. 

In Milan, we plunged into all the intensity of Milan Design Week to visit brands such as Hermès, Minotti and Molteni&C, and discover how they’re exploring new ways of living through a dialogue between craft, materials and sensory experience. Among immersive installations, hybrid objects and the intersection of different dimensions, a common thread in the contemporary condition became apparent: the creation of spaces that defy a single interpretation and are built upon layers of intention, memory and projection. Places conceived not as rigid structures, but rather as possibilities in a state of continuous reformulation.

Over these pages, we have gone beyond physical mobility to address a state of ontological displacement. Nomadism is not merely about going somewhere, but about never quite arriving. It is about living in that nuanced space between belonging and absence. What form can a destination take when the subject that experiences it is undergoing constant transformation? What value do objects acquire when they begin to register their passage? And how is a space that does not seek to contain, but rather keep pace, to be designed? There is an almost mystical dimension to impermanence. Not as absence, but as an uninformed choice. Lightness not as emptiness, but as an accessible part. Reduction not as loss, but as liberation. The author Fernando Pessoa never truly inhabited any single place, even when motionless. Perhaps because true nomadism is measured in states of mind. It is in this indescribable territory, between thought and matter, between interior and exterior, that this edition begins. Not as an absolute answer, but as an attempt at an approximation.