BASE Milano at Design Week 2024 - WE WILL DESIGN: The Convivial Laboratory

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.


Talamo: the installation by Lemonot BASE
A performative sculpture suspended and habitable. An immense light bed, which becomes a room without delimiting a volume, without ever closing. A soft, fluid landscape that will take shape thanks to its constant movement between floor and ceiling, shaped by the force of gravity and the interactions with the most disparate bodies – that will alter, indeed create, the topography.

Exhibit
A place of research and experimentation on democratic and plural design: Exhibit is the great exhibition of We Will Design which collects the works of academies, universities, design studios, emerging designers, and presents the unprecedented restitution of residency processes.

Temporary Home
Also this year, We Will Design, casaBASE — our guesthouse — will be Temporary Home: a unique residence for five designers and artists from all over Europe. Five rooms will be home and place of experimentation of the designers, who here will develop, exhibit and tell their projects to the public.

Music
Responding in music to visions of the society to come. Also this edition of We Will Design will be MUSIC: a musical festival that will animate all the evenings during the Fuori Salone 2024.

FLOWAIR: Ingo Maurer 's installation for miart and Design Week 2024
Amorphous textures, fluid shapes and organic elements. FLOWAIR is the large site-specific installation designed by the Ingo Maurer team at BASE at miart 2024.

TALAMO is supported by Culture Moves Europe - financed by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe Institut - realised in partnership with Noctis spa, an Italian company with a great craft tradition specialised in bedding.

ISTITUTIONAL PARTNERS: Ambasciata e Consolato Generale del Regno dei Paesi Bassi, Istituto Romeno, British Council, Roman Design Week, Institut Français, Canada, Creative Industries Fund NL
PARTNERS: Noctis, Campari Soda, Volvo, Lavazza
CULTURAL PARTNERS: DOPO Space, Le Cannibale
TECHNICAL PARTNERS: Veryseri, Crema Video, Paper & People