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Making Kin: New Connections at BASE Milano for Fuorisalone 2025

Design — 20 January 2025
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BASE Milano

First meeting with Chus Martínez, director of the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel

Hybridization, contamination, relationship: the Fuorisalone.it theme for the 2025 edition of Milan design week originates right there, where boundaries blur and new connections between species and universes develop. Just as Connected Worlds aims to represent a fil rouge in relation to the themes of previous editions of Fuorisalone.it, revealing a willingness to explore new forms of connection and contamination between design, artificial intelligence and collective participation, in the same way BASE Milano's 2025 theme, Making Kin (making kinship), represents for the Tortona cultural center the possibility of creating different ties and establishing networks of new friendships, distancing itself from the exclusively biological bond and including other-than-human creatures and entities.
Not just simple slogans but rather invitations to reflect on the correlations between design and the different expressions of human life. With Making Kin, BASE Milano thus explores relationships born not from familiar dimensions but from conscious choices, shared affinities, interests and sensibilities: new forms of kinship that are also an act of creative resistance.

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Photo courtesy of Cartacarbone

“In 2025, BASE will devote itself to making kinship as an intentional and creative act - says Linda Di Pietro, Artistic Director of BASE - going beyond biological connections to build meaningful relationships between humans, nonhumans and more than humans. This exploration aims to rethink relationships in an ecological and intersectional key, to create new ways of coexistence and collaboration, where interdependence and alliance replace division and exclusion" 

One of the first declinations will take place in April 2025 with We Will Design, the workshop dedicated to experimentation that has welcomed and promoted design projects from around the world. Created in collaboration with schools and young students, universities and prestigious international institutions, We Will Design develops during Milan Design Week but it also transcends its boundaries, hosting a program of international residencies and international exchanges that make BASE a reference point for creativity and interchange among knowledge and expertise always different. A truly unique place, capable of weaving relationships of care and mutual exchange, to create moments of sharing and contamination in practices and that comes to life through three macro-projects: the Exhibit, the large exhibition of We Will Design that brings together the work of academies, universities, design studios, and emerging designers; Temporary Home, the project within casaBASE which transforms 5 rooms into as many ateliers where resident designers' creations can be exhibited; Camp, which since last year has offered 20 creatives and designers a campsite on the terrace of BASE, against the high rents in the city of Milan, in order to live a collective experiment and explore new forms of living. 

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Photo courtesy of Andrea Nicotra

The heart of this edition will be the installation Weekend Week by Matilde Cassani Studio, the result of a reflection on the “hidden” places of Milan, a challenge, the search for a dimension of suspension and well-being to be inhabited during the "Milan's weeks". The intent is to generate unprecedented spatialities for a new form of conviviality of space in the Ground Hall of BASE, creating a fickle environment, a place that changes its appearance thanks to the visitors who pass through it, a space adaptable to “making kinship.”

Starting from January, the program of We Will Design - Making kin also includes an approach Public Program that aims to explore food, its practices and rituals as a symbolic and practical act of “making kin,” in which ecology, culture, relationship and care are intertwined. The first event at BASE Milano will be held on February 19, 2025 with Chus Martínez, the director of the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel.

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Photo courtesy of BASE





Tag: Fuorisalone 2025 Milano Design Week Preview FS 2025 Design Milan



© Fuorisalone.it — All rights reserved. — Published on 20 January 2025

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