“CASE” is the name of the Public Program focused on the themes of coexistence and cohabitation at BASE Milano from January to March 2024.
Like any social phenomenon, the birth of the Public Program “CASE” can be traced back to an occasional cause, a precise cause and a contextual cause, as well as to more ancient and macroscopic reasons. The occasional cause was the wave of dissent that has swept through Milan in recent months, in response to the problem of expensive rents, and which found its most striking manifestation in the spring of 2023 with the “protest of the tents” in Piazza Leonardo in front of Politecnico di Milano. The deeper causes instead have to do with a wider planetary malaise: a huge ontological question that concerns the real possibility of coexistence in a complex, hyper-globalized context, in which the social, political and environmental crises have left us in a precarious limbo, without certainties nor holds.
How to build new foundations for planetary and local coexistence that are based on conviviality, understood as a collective need based on mutualism, mutual care and solidarity? What spatial strategies can we look at to test new forms of civic cohabitation and alternative modes of existence?
Through a series of three monthly events, CASE aims to create opportunities for critical discussion and dialogue on these issues, both urgent and transversal compared to class and geography, thus generating a polyphonic conversation that will result in the program of Design Week 2024.
CASE does not address the issue of housing emergency directly. On the contrary, it does so in a transversal way, looking at very different realities that, through experimental spatial practices, experiences of alternative pedagogy, forms of politico-artistic activism experience alternative modes of mutualism and solidarity.
The first chapter (January 30, 2024) will feature the Turkish researcher and activist Pelin Tan, who has been studying for years temporary housing infrastructure (for example refugee camps or shelters for earthquake victims) not as free zones, liminal and without rules, but rather as virtuous models of commons. The second chapter (February 28, 2024) will see a conversation between Rosario Talevi, architect, editor, curator and educator specialized in transformative pedagogies, and the collective forty five degrees (Berta Gutierrez and Alkistis Thomidou), committed to identifying cases study that testify to the existence of alternative communities along the 45th parallel north in Europe. Finally, the third chapter (March 15, 2024) will materialize in the form of a construction workshop led by architect and researcher Francesca Gotti, an expert in spatial self-handling and shared management practices.
Following an ideal path that, from a macroscopic and planetary perspective (Pelin Tan), plunges into a dimension more closely linked to Milan (Francesca Gotti), passing through a European medium-length scale (Floating University and forty five degrees), CASE wants to offer ideas and perspectives that, if not exhaustive, can at least inspire and nourish the imagination.
In conjunction with each episode of the public program will be launched a fanzine with in-depth material. Check this out.
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