World-making: new rituals and the embodiment of many worlds

Chapter 3 / extract from InDepth ISSUE #17
written and curated by Cecilia Casabona, Design Ambassador for We Will Design 2026 @ BASE Milano.

di Cecilia Casabona
design

Trained as a product designer and later graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven, I have since been acting – performing! – as a curator, working across the multitude of design forms and contemporary art. Alongside my practice, my fascination with contemporary rituals has grown throughout this journey. Rituals are powerful tools through which the collective body can reclaim space and agency.

Design, through its strong social and bottom-up nature, has contributed in many ways to reshape our rituals and habits, too often while also creating significant damage. 

We consider a ritual to be ceremonial, shared, and performed (or at least witnessed) by a community or a collective. It should comprise a fixed sequence of actions that repeat consistently. Yet the gaps are numerous: cross-cultural, cross-traditional, and intrapersonal. When rituals are extrapolated from their original context and community, they risk being voided of their meaning. 

Material culture has always played a multifaceted role in our collective experience – the functional, the symbolic, and the sacred. The transformative power of contemporary rituals might be ambiguous – what is, today, a ritual? – but it becomes clearer when considering art, design, and technology and the choices within. 

Under this framework, I can recall two projects that through their own materiality have nurtured the collective of a renewed rituality. 

Tenderlymilitant.exe

The first is Tenderlymilitant.exe by Anna Zoe Hamm. Within this project, we are invited to expand our understanding of the collective to include the non-human realm, as Zoe draws our attention to the world of plants in relation to women’s history. Through her broom armoury collection, she draws from defensive mechanisms plants have developed against predators, coding a new performativity in relation to the broom as both an object of empowerment and persecution for women. This embodies what she calls “a tender militancy”, one “that is able to counter the emotional impact of patriarchy.” The brooms are activated through a performance drawing from martial arts, intending to instill collective agency to resist systems of domination. 

Tribavox

Tribavox is a spell, a ritual initiation chant – the exchange of liquids and money, the flow of liquid ingested into pleasure poison-potion and then discharged. Zoe Williams & HYDRA (in the film-trailer) plays with notions of service, intimacy and consumption – soon the full version.

Dandelion Feast

Lastly, I want to acknowledge the work of jurist, designer, and shamanic practitioner Viktória Kaslik, specifically through her work on dandelions. “Dandelion Feast“1 is a protocol born after 2.5 years of artistic and legal research following the question of why humans relate to land hierarchically. The protocol exists both as a publication and as a performative activation drawing from the performativity of laws – here also emerges my personal fascination with performative utterances as first theorized by John Austin.2 ”Rethinking legal costumes has been a long-held dream of mine in my journey of exploring the ritualistic elements of contemporary law and the legal environment we live in. I’ve always believed that law is performative. That law shapes reality and affects through performance. I found myself gravitating towards this question the most in my inquiries, where I constantly ask what the laws, sourced from the body of the earth, look like.”3 Viktória, born and trained as a jurist in Hungar, began this journey with her first project “Legal Reparation” (developed at DAE in 2021), a video installation exploring and visualizing the effects of contemporary constitutionalism on individual and collective bodies. Her path has intertwined with design in an unexpected way as she embraced the opportunities of understanding the discipline beyond traditional boundaries – to design as to heal. 

1 KASLIK, VIKTÓRIA. Dandelion Feast:  A protocol to eliminate legal waste from Earth bodies.
ISBN: 9 788397 320352, 2025. 
2 AUSTIN, JOHN. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, 1962.
3 Words by Viktória Kaslik. 

è una cosa seria?

iscriviti alla newsletter di BASE: troverai tutte le novità su ciò che facciamo, ciò che ci piace e dove vogliamo stare.