Maëlys Venkiah — The Shape of Sugar

Using caramel as a poetic medium and exploring colonial history, fragility, and transformation through melting hand-molded sculptures.

Maëlys Venkiah, The Shape of Sugar - MDW26 BASE Milano
by BASE Milano

The Shape of Sugar uses caramel as a sculptural and poetic material.

It silently confronts the colonial history of sugar, letting the material speak for itself. Hand-molded sculptures either crystallize or slowly melt, making fragility, impermanence, and care central elements of the work while questioning the value of time and the ephemeral.

The exhibition becomes a temporal experience, inviting visitors to observe transformation, loss, and the traces of a colonial past.

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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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