Is it possible to write a show by making trap music?
How do you tell a story about a neighborhood with music?
And with dance?
Do you want to tell your story or your neighborhood’s story but haven’t found your tools yet?
Don’t know whether to write it, dance it or rap it?

Trap Community Opera is an artistic path composed of different disciplines – physical theater, writing, trap music, dance, video – aimed at boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 25 where participants will be able to be protagonists in the creation of an opera, starting from its conception and arriving at its final realization.

The creation path takes place from January to May 2024 and consists of three disciplines: theater, music and trap music.

Would you like to join us? Write Milano Mediterranea via DM on Instagram or call them at +39 342 12 48 450

＊A project by Milano Mediterranea in partnership with BASE Milano, with the contribution of Fondazione Di Comunità Milano nell’ambito della rassegna Musicami.

We are delighted to be partnering with the British Council for the third year running. As in previous years, the call is open to UK-based designers who have previously participated in the British Council’s Circular Cultures programme, or global programme Making Matters, which aims to foster a global dialogue around the topic of circular design and making.

Circular Cultures explores how principles of the circular economy can be a catalyst for creativity, collaboration and regenerative thinking within architecture, design and fashion practice. Operating across nine countries in EU Europe, the programme aims to provide a space for an international exchange of knowledge and expertise, create new EU networks and explore how design & making can respond to global environmental challenges to support restorative and alternative futures.

Thanks to the partnership with BASE, emerging designers and creatives will have the opportunity to participate for the first time in the Milan Design Week (2024) receiving funding.

The call will remain open until December 15 at this link and you can apply by presenting a project on the themes of space activism and convivialism.

In line with the activities proposed by the We Will Design project, the objective of this collaboration is the continuous exchange of knowledge and experience on design as a tool for reading and social research, as well as the construction of increasingly dense and generative international networks.

*Stimulerings fonds / Creative Industries Fund NL is the Dutch national cultural fund for design, architecture and digital culture. It funds innovative, often interdisciplinary design projects.

BASE Milano is a plural cultural institution that is always listening, inside and outside a space where more and more people of all origins, cultures, gender identities and economic conditions can feel foreseen, welcomed and represented.
Therefore, we cannot remain silent and we join the voices of the marginalised and torn communities in the escalation of violence and war in the Palestinian territories and around the world.

We are frightened and shocked by the firm and silent institutional context and we strongly reaffirm our unconditional condemnation of all war crimes and all forms of violence against civilians and other forms of oppression and discrimination.
We unite to the immediate cease the fire request and we expect that all civilians are protected. We demand that international humanitarian law is applied and that any violation is prosecuted on the basis of this law.

As a cultural centre, we are on an uphill path to think of a plural art institution, through a decanonisation process and the questioning of the power mechanisms and the rigid systems of knowledge production and dissemination.
We are aware of the weight of each one of these words, and we are trying to preserve them from being emptied and reduced to slogans.
Instead, we strive every day to fill them with content through our cultural programme and by choosing the people and realities we co-design with, aware that we are acting in a profoundly political manner.

As cultural institution we feel and take the responsibility to be space of border and discussion, a platform for listening and dialogue, and we express our full solidarity with racialised, marginalised and abused communities such as that of Palestinians.

As every year, last week we were at the Dutch Design Week, in Eindhoven from 21 to 29 October 2023.
Between design of the future and design future here are our three favorite projects.

1. MULTIFORM — Gabriel Fontana

What is your position in a group? When was the last time you were in the minority?
With ‘Multiform’ Gabriel Fontana reveals the competitive and regulatory aspects of team sport and presents a more social variant. Every time the referee whistles, the uniform changes color and players change teams. The uniform becomes multiform. Can you remember your allies?

MORE ABOUT MULTIFORM →

2. The body is a movement — Onomatopee & Baltan

While living in capitalist structures, our bodies became vehicles for profit, to be optimised for productivity, constant work and efficiency. Our bodies become quantified, while our basic physical needs, such as sleep, pleasure, and everything governed by our biological clocks, end up as the very last entries of our never-ending to-do lists.

The body is a movement is, in effect, a gym: a space to train and try other ways of being inside and with our body through movement, rest or connection with others.
Eight design projects challenge how we feel and force us, physically, to take care of our bodies. They hack the systems we use to move, they change the way we listen to our bodies, and they allow us to explore new ways in which our bodies can teach us to be in our surroundings.

MORE ABOUT THE BODY IS A MOVEMENT →

3. the ‘ORGANic club — Liam Ziyi

A pink cart moves through the Dutch streets. It is the same in every way as ice cream, except for a small detail: it sells offal.
the ‘ORGANic club challenges the stereotypes surrounding the consumption of offal in the Netherlands, breaking down – literally – political and cultural preconceptions.

MORE ABOUT THE ORGANic CLUB →

＊ We Will Design is a project that lasts a whole year. We actively participate in European design fairs and tell you about them. How many projects will you recognize during Design Week 2024?

Erica Petrillo participates in the fourth edition of We Will Design 2024, In-Difference, as Curator-in-residence.

“The lens through which I look at the fields of art and culture steers away from mere aesthetic considerations. Reflecting my background, I am interested in art, design, architecture as reflections and continuations of sociopolitical phenomena, contexts and communities; but also as tools for research, intervention and action, rather than as an end in itself. BASE, like every cultural centre, has the responsibility of creating the conditions to become an arena of critical discussion to test alternative ideas and strategies that can help us consciously navigate, as well as survive ethically and intellectually, in today’s hyper-complex world. This is the approach that I’d like to contribute to the dialogue that BASE has started via We Will Design.”

Erica Petrillo is a curator with a background in political philosophy and social sciences. She’s currently based in Milan, where I collaborate with the interdisciplinary agency 2050+, whilst in parallel working on several independent projects. Erica has co-curated public programs and exhibitions for various cultural institutions, in Italy and beyond. These include the series of R&D Salons at MoMA in New York; Broken Nature, the 22nd Triennale di Milano; Open, the Russian Pavilion at the 17th Architecture Biennale of Venice; and Babel, the 13th Video Sound Art Festival.

“We have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualization has destroyed the empathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to work and virtual exchange”.

Francesco Bifo Berardi and Geert Lovink. 2011. “A Call to the Army of love and to the Army of Software,” published online by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 

​What would it be to transform BASE into a place of political presence where designers, artists and students live and reinvent the space?

WE WILL DESIGN seeks to imagine new forms of coexistence and interdependence based on Convivialism principles such as cooperation, democracy, dialogue between cultures, equal dignity, and ecological responsibility.
We want to explore the ability to create different forms of interdependent relationships, contemplating our behaviours, feelings, and spatiality.​We will use performativity as a tool to rewrite the spatial conditions of everyday life.​
We will promote the fantastic and the desirable as guiding principles.​
We will commit ourselves to creating exceptional and ordinary rituals to share with the visitors and citizens of the design week. ​

During the Design Week 2024 BASE opens the doors of its spaces to the construction of a temporary community of emerging designers, architects, and artists who will live and work within the spaces.
Those will be transformed for the occasion into a laboratory of “conviviality” that invites visitors to reflect on the most innovative practices of coexistence, cohabitation and sharing currently present in Europe and their interrelation with the spectre of migration, gender, ability, health, and cultural background.​

Does that sound interesting?

IN—DIFFERENCE: DESIGN, SPATIAL ACTIVISM, CONVIVIALISM
Call for entries for Design Week 2024 at BASE Milano

DEADLINE: DECEMBER 11TH, 2023

You haven’t recognized yourself in the call but 
you still want to propose us your brand or project as an exhibitor ?

Please email: design@base.milano.it

Our desire to imagine a possible new future cannot be limited to one week a year. 
This is why BASE chooses to go beyond the confines of Design Week and proposes an approach that uses design as a tool for collective research and construction that can no longer be achieved through a short exhibition of projects but also through design residences and collaborative projects.

WE WILL DESIGN
A double approach that can unfold as a longer journey that will develop throughout the year and will culminate during Design Week or can be a shorter experience during one of the greatest moments of creative expression on the international stage in Milan.

The expression “To Make a Long Story Short” means getting directly to the important part of a narrative, leaving out unimportant or boring details and what may seem irrelevant information.

In a nutshell, it means choosing which version of the story to convey.

As backbone of this festival’s edition, “LONG STORY SHORT” moves on this misunderstanding.
Found in the slippery space between the History with a capital letter – official, contracted, mediated – and the plurality of the tiny stories, that are often times considered irrelevant. Yet, plural narratives could have produced plural futures. Futures that we cannot imagine today.

“A story exists only when it’s told” and all untold stories are part of repressed possibilities. Erasing, removing, forgetting some stories prevents us from experimenting with alternative paths of development of a human, political and social nature.

What if these stories could be told again? Could they become a form of public expression?

This is the purpose which brings together all the artistic performances that will take place in the more than 10 days of this edition of FAROUT.
This year we bring to FAROUT projects that are acts of resistance and liberation from standards and paradigms, from what is culturally and historically accepted.

We do this through the body, the generative ability of the word, the (im)possible dialogue between worlds in conflict. We listen to generational reactions to the collapse of ideologies. We free the representation of sexuality from patriarchal dynamics.

From the meeting of these proposals develop the paths that the public can choose to undertake, to the discovery of a plural voice of history.

The aesthetics of FAROUT 2023 also accompany us in this narration. Words become images and distort, deform, lose meaning (or find a new one). As in the performances of the festival we research and tell the omitted, denied, rewritten, evoked words, as well in the treatment of the phrase How to do things with words (J.L. Austin, 1962), the author guides through the discovery of the linguistic act, which does not limit to describe, but is capable of producing imagination and changes, new worlds.

Linda Di Pietro, Creative Director, BASE Milano