Io Wu — YEAR

Installation using reclaimed wood inspired by the Year Beast myth, reflecting on forests, timber trade, and the human–nature relationship.

by BASE Milano

Year is inspired by the Chinese myth of the Year Beast, a creature embodying both fear and reverence for the forest.  Using discarded wood, the work exposes the blindness within global timber trade—when the origin of wood is lost, our connection to the forest fades. 
Through rings and resin, trees inscribe stories of resistance and repair under cycles of light, pressure, and drought. 
Year invites viewers to listen to the forest’s breath in the dark and rethink how we coexist with nature. 

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We Will Design 2026 — HELLO, DARKNESS embraces design as a tool for subverting hierarchies and weaving together ecologies and technologies to imagine the cities and societies of the future.
It is an invitation to recognize the abyss — political, ecological, aesthetic — we’re living in, not as a place of fear, but as a space of regeneration, resistance, and imagination. Darkness here is not absence, but a fertile condition that embraces invisible gestures, marginalized knowledge, and luminous forms of resistance.

So... is this getting serious?

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