Arte Povera — "poor art" — erupted from Turin in 1967 when critic Germano Celant gave a name to what a generation of Italian artists were already doing: building sculptures from dirt, felt, neon tubes, and live horses. Mario Merz's wire-mesh igloos glowed with Fibonacci sequences in cold neon; Kounellis filled a Roman gallery with twelve tethered horses; Pistoletto leaned polished mirrors against the wall and let the viewer become the work.

Translated into a design system, Arte Povera becomes burlap-textured surfaces, iron-oxide earth tones, chalk-handwritten captions, and the occasional cold-blue neon accent tracing Fibonacci numbers. Every element insists on its materiality — nothing is polished, nothing pretends to be anything other than what it is.