We Will Design will be back at BASE from April 15th to 21st.

What does it mean to transform BASE into a place of political stance, where designers, artists, and students inhabit and reinvent the notion of space? And to do so in the context of the Design Week – the key moment of the year that transforms Milan into the global reference point for the design industry? Furthermore, what does it mean to do it in Zona Tortona, the first urban district dedicated to design, as well as one of the core areas of the Fuorisalone?

Driven by these questions, BASE Milano presents the 2024 edition of We Will Design, the large experimental laboratory that, since 2021, welcomes and promotes projects from designers worldwide, schools, universities, international institutions, and young students.
A project that points to resonate further and beyond the temporal limits of the Design Week, hosting residences and international exchange programs throughout the year – and where design practices and experiences, may serve as a tool to read, and sometimes resolve, the many contradictions that constitute our present. The program is conceived as a testing ground for projects which are due to be activated and shared with the wider public on the days of the Design Week.

In occasion of the Milan Design Week 2024, BASE becomes host to the construction of a temporary community that will live and work within the complex of the former Ansaldo, transformed for the occasion into a “Conviviality Laboratory”. The goal is to explore how designers, architects, and citizens have the ability to come up with new ways of engaging in interdependent relationships -starting from ordinary behaviours, gestures, feelings, and space.

We Will Design 2024 will be an invitation to reflect on the most innovative international practices of coexistence, cohabitation, and sharing – particularly in light of their relation to the current topics of migration, gender, abilities, health, and cultural backgrounds.

We Will Design will seek to imagine new modes of coexistence and interdependence based on principles such as cooperation, democracy, dialogue between cultures, equal dignity, and ecological responsibility.

While cities proceed relentlessly in the production of futuristic and elitist structures, utopian visions of domesticity survive, alongside the fabrication of autonomous solutions and informal settlements. In this context, dwelling becomes a gesture of resistance, as well as the affirmation of human dignity. BASE Milano embraces this notion – vouching for an approach that valorizes thoughts and projects, rather just spaces and objects.

We inhabit the future, we inhabit turmoil, we inhabit worlds that do not exist yet, bodies that are collective organisms.

CASE — Public Program

JANUARY — MARCH 2024

The issue of ‘Dwelling’ which is the core topic of We Will Design 2024, will be addressed in all its complexity in CASE, the Public Program that BASE Milano dedicates to the themes of coexistence and cohabitation – running from January to March 2024: a series of three monthly events curated by Erica Petrillo, a curator with a background in social sciences and political philosophy.

The spark that ignited the creation of CASE is a result of the wave of dissent that swept through the city of Milan in response to the increase of rent prices, which found its peak moment in the spring of 2023, with the “protesta delle tende”(tent protest) in Piazza Leonardo, in front of the Polytechnic University of Milan.

This phenomenon, however, has deeper roots, linked to a broader global crisis concerning humanity’s capacity to coexist in a complex, hyper-globalized context – this is the result of a long series of political, environmental, and social turmoils which have left us in a precarious limbo, lacking certainties or footholds.

How is it possible, then, to reconstitute the foundations for a global and local coexistence based on conviviality – where this notion is understood as a collective necessity linked to mutualism, mutual care, and solidarity? How can we adjust our attitude toward shared space, in testing new forms of civic cohabitation and alternative modes of existence?

CASE does not address the issue of housing emergency in a straightforward, direct way; it does so in a cross-cutting manner, by looking at a wide range of diverse realities that explore alternative forms of mutualism and solidarity – through experimental spatial practices, experiences of alternative pedagogy, and modes of political-artistic activism.

Wednesday, January 31st – Turkish researcher and activist Pelin Tan will present her studies dedicated to infrastructures for temporary cohabitation – such as refugee camps or communities affected by earthquakes – introducing them as places where virtuous practices of commons are experimented.

Wednesday, February 28th – Rosario Talevi, member of the Floating center for alternative pedagogies and ecologies in Berlin, will engage in a dialogue with Berta Gutierres and Alkistis Thomidou, from the collective forty-five degrees –whose purpose is identifying case-studies that testify to the existence of alternative communities situated along the 45th parallel North in Europe.

Friday, March 15th 2024 – The final event will host a construction workshop led by the architect and researcher Francesca Gotti, expert in spatial self-production practices and shared management.

CASE aims to create an opportunity for critical discussion and dialogue to address these crucial themes – as urgent as they are broad in terms of class and geographic concern – by generating a polyphonic conversation that will culminate in the program of Design Week 2024.

Installation: TALAMO

MIART 2024

While We Will Design 2024 will turn BASE Milano into a recipient for the construction of a temporary community, living and working together to reflect on new forms of relationships, TALAMO – will be a performative sculpture by Lemonot (London-Based architects duo of Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri), made in collaboration with Xavier Madden and Katja Banović.
The work will address the same themes as We Will Design, and it will be inaugurated during Miart 2024 – the International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair.

In this context, TALAMO will be presented as a convivial architecture: an immense, yet light-weight bed, in suspension between floor and ceiling. A soft and fluid landscape, drawn by gravity and bodies, will constitute its topography. A dynamic stage that will animate choreographies and fantastical configurations – beginning with performers arisandmartha (Aris Papadopoulos and Martha Pasakopoulou), and later calling for the direct engagement of the audience – thus blurring the boundary between matter and the human body.

TALAMO will resort to performative practices to reinvent forms of spontaneous theatricality which linger in everyday life, turning ordinary rituals into something exceptional.
In its continuous becoming and dissolving, TALAMO will be a living object, capable of embracing each and everyone’s physicality, while placing it in a dimension of renewed collective confrontation.

TALAMO is a project supported by Culture Moves Europe – funded by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe Institut – created in partnership with Noctis spa, high quality Italian manufacture company specialized in bedding.

Lara Facco P&C