For the third edition of We Will Design: We have an I.D.E.A. A space for marginalized communities, when other institutions have failed to recognize them
BASE: a cultural production hub in Milan’s city center
BASE Milano is a community for social innovation and contamination between arts, enterprise, and technology in Milan. A creative hub with an international atmosphere that lives in continuous dialogue with the city from 2016. Located within the ex-Ansaldo complex, one of the most relevant urban regeneration projects in Europe, BASE assets rise from the co-existence of research, experimentation and social design activities, together with the production and co-production of cultural and entertainment initiatives.
BASE pursues its mission as plural and inclusive artistic institution by supporting decolonisation processes and promoting a creative space where race, gender, social class differences and access to culture are intertwined.
BASE Milano: a platform to a plural and diversified community
For this year and the following, BASE has inaugurated a new approach both in the cases of productions — for Design Week 2023 — and real campaigns that promote the themes of inclusion, equity, diversity and accessibility, trying to reach the most vulnerable communities and the themes commonly unrecognized and undermined: intergenerational issues, economic disadvantage, racialization, social exclusion.
BASE answers a simple question: how can the institution open up and give space to the voices that had not been heard in the last 100-200 years? The first step for BASE is to question itself as an institution and start as an internal capacity building process in which it has also questioned the critical issues of the organization itself by involving other institutions.
Diversity and Inclusion are not a pop trend: promoting a cultural shift at BASE
Fighting to overcome the misrepresentation became part of a process launched in response to international stimuli, as also the European Union is working on finding a solution. The conversation about inclusivity has reached levels of discussion like it happened for every pop trend out there. Will the discussion be over in a few years once the theme starts to get socially irrelevant? We, as a society, cannot allow that to happen.
The dialogue that has been created is often assertive and top-down perpetrated by the same institutions that carry on the inclusivity narrative without actively engaging with the communities involved. These issues cannot be dealt with without extending the point of view to marginalized communities that have not had the opportunity to speak up until now. BASE brings the discussion forward, not just from an ideal standpoint, by working with those marginalized communities that are not always listened to.
BASE’s choice was to stand for these ideals and the campaigning for inclusivity for over a year now and can count on a strong, plural and diversified community. It wasn’t given by the need to align the directives given from above: it would have been the same as aligning with the current pop trend.
BASE at Design Week 2023 – We have an I.D.E.A. Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility
The Design Week at BASE is called We Will Design: for this third edition it is completed with the payoff ‘We have an I.D.E.A’. We Will Design was born as an independent platform in opposition to the commercial direction of the Fuorisalone. We Will Design is a large experimental laboratory promoted by BASE presenting projects by designers from all over the world, schools, universities, international institutions and young students, developed around the acronym I.D.E.A.: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility. The goal is to activate a reflection during Design Week on the concept of democratic, plural and inclusive design, involving people of all ages, abilities, genders and cultures.
While representing an opportunity for designers during Design Week, BASE’s work during these few days is the tip of an iceberg of a whole functional process that creates community and public debate all year long. For BASE ‘We Will Design’ lasts all year round, with design residencies and co-creation processes, proposing an offer on the market with a system that is economically accessible to designers.
Plurality at BASE Milano
On the question of plurality: the projects created to answer the call of I.D.E.A. do not just answer to the themes but also on the level of the viewer’s experience. An example: some designers dwell into the theme of disability because they are experiencing the disability on their own skin. Therefore, they are making a proposal to the public to use different senses from those through which design is normally experienced. So, beyond the understanding of the theme, different levels of experience on the plurality of design are offered.
The formats at BASE during Design Week: lens through which looking at the contemporary
BASE’s choice was to create a vertical base platform on speculative design that worked as a lens through which to look at the contradictions of the contemporary. It does so using different formats: the entrance hosts an immersive installation on the themes that are dealt with during the whole event, such as the installation Cancel Patriarchy by the collective Claire Fontaine, an immersive experience that invites you to deal with some of the main questions of the contemporary.
The installation welcomes the audience with the monumental phrases Patriarchy kills (love) and We are all clitoridian women, explicitly questioning our usual emotional and social context, and bringing into the architectural space issues that show how political the personal is. In fact, we are the patriarchy, says the artist, and it is up to each and every one to get rid of it, starting from one’s own feelings and one’s own unsatisfied need for love and life. The installation is a tribute to Carla Lonzi, in which the clitoral woman represents the revolutionary pleasure denied by the oppressor, the unexpected subject who, outside the usual reading grids of society, arises and makes new possibilities of freedom appear.
There will be a light installation on a feminist reflection based on the work by Carla Lonzi, what it is like to live as a woman in this particular moment in history and their role in the society.
Exhibit and Temporary Home at Milan Design Week
After the light installation by Claire Fontaine two large formats will be created: Exhibit, a platform for experimenting and comparing young designers from academies with the public, and Temporary Home, a space with the aim of undermining the concept of Design Week as a moment of seven days that are no longer sustainable even from an environmental point of view, but to consider it as an opportunity to work on the process rather than the output.
Some of the projects in the exhibit are the result of a year-long work of co-design at BASE, that has consolidated a yearly-long program of residencies that creates communities and provides a place of experimentation and creation for artists and designers.
BASE Milano
BASE is a cultural hub that produces social innovation and cultural contamination between the arts, businesses and technology in Milan. A creative community with an international atmosphere, BASE stands as a plural and inclusive artistic institution, supporting processes and works in the space where differences of race, gender, social class and access to culture intersect.
