{"id":39338,"date":"2026-04-02T18:13:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T16:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/base.milano.it\/?p=39338"},"modified":"2026-07-02T15:06:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T13:06:19","slug":"how-can-we-mend-our-broken-hearts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/base.milano.it\/en\/how-can-we-mend-our-broken-hearts\/","title":{"rendered":"How can We mend our broken hearts?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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As we entered 2026 with what little hope we could muster \u2013 painfully gathered, perhaps even self-inflicted \u2013 we were quickly reminded of our “delulu” fantasies. We were confronted with the hypocrisy we had blindly nurtured: fake ceasefires, the erasure of histories, the massacre of generations fighting to be heard, the silencing, deportation, and murder of entire communities \u2013 and we could go on. Then came the final (better say the latest) blow: the revelation of a truth we all knew but loved to deny, hiding behind illusory democratic ideals and false truths \u2013 yes, I’m talking about the Epstein files and the disgusting inaction that followed.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I can only say that I feel heartbroken. But this does not feel like the usual heartbreak.<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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It lacks that bittersweet quality of romantic heartbreaks that magically remind us we’re alive. This heartbreak marks deeper and broader: it is collective, societal, and political. And grief follows \u2013 viciously for some, abruptly for others \u2013 dividing us all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[While this article was written in the middle of February, the US-Israel war against Iran had not broken out yet. Another unbearable grief to bear for the murder of 150 girl students, and the ones that will follow to support this nonsense.] <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of my most important references, both in work and life, is Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World<\/em>.1<\/sup> It tells the story of matsutake mushrooms \u2013 rare, valuable fungi that only grow in human-disturbed forests and cannot be farmed. The book traces their global supply chain from Oregon forests to Japanese restaurants, exploring how they survive in “capitalist ruins” and what they teach us about precarity, collaboration between humans and non-humans, and finding life in the ruins of industrial destruction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This story presents precarity as a shared condition of life and as a generative ground for collaborative survival among human and nonhuman beings. It approaches survival not as individual achievement but as collective practice shaped by vulnerability, interdependence, and uncertainty. \u2028Living is always relational and emergent, and it is precisely through indeterminacy and mutual exposure that life evolves and transforms. \u2028The matsutake mushrooms violently and poetically mirror how life persists and creates new possibilities in our damaged world, challenging narratives of linear progress and offering hope in the darkness of uncertainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on this powerful story, I came to value precarity and vulnerability instead of devaluing them as neoliberal societies usually do. From this perspective, I also learned to appreciate moments of exhaustion, brokenness, and ugliness that constitute our intimate yet collective experiences with a world that is also, by consequence and by its own ontology, exhausted, broken, and ugly. As Gargi Bhattacharyya powerfully states in their book We, the Heartbroken: “I don’t believe we can build a different, better world without being heartbroken<\/em>.”2<\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This article explores darkness through the lens of heartbreak, but also through knowing that “every dream of a new world requires us to understand we have been broken by the old.\u201d 3<\/sup><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Fallen into this darkness, we embrace Bhattacharyya’s revolutionary thought for which \u201cheartbreak is the class consciousness of our times,<\/em>\u201d4<\/sup> and we turn to designers and artists who have transformed brokenness into empowering acts of collaborative survival. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1<\/sup> TSING, ANNA LOWENHAUPT. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins<\/em>. Princeton University Press, 2015.
2, 3, 4<\/sup> BHATTACHARYYA GARGI. We, the Heartbroken.<\/em> Hajar Press, London, 2023. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cecilia Casabona reframes collective heartbreak over systemic failure and war as a generative force, transforming shared vulnerability into a revolutionary tool for building life within ruins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":39436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,554,95],"tags":[226],"class_list":["post-39338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-en","category-hello-darkness-en","category-wewilldesign-en","tag-design-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow can We mend our broken hearts? - BASE Milano<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"BASE hands over the pen to its Design Ambassadors, who explore and reinterpret, the curatorial theme of 2026, Hello Darkness.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/base.milano.it\/en\/how-can-we-mend-our-broken-hearts\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How can We mend our broken hearts? 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