becoming lore: relations and realities

First presented during Design Week at BASE, Zona Tortona, Milan - 7-13th April 2025, for their curated exhibition Making Kin

Part of an ongoing exploration on open-ended knowledge practices and design pedagogies, becoming lore looks into what positions folklore and collective story building can occupy in the reconfiguration of how we experience and think of relationships in our presents and futures.

The project challenges the obsessive connections euro-centric epistemologies have established between knowledge and precision, and instead aims to investigate the ambiguous, moving, underdefined nature of relational knowledge practices. Knowledge in becoming.

We relate the idea of ‘becoming’ not only to a temporal dimension, but to the ontologically plural and relational nature of these forms of being and knowing. Knowledges are everywhere, we can’t own them but can learn some of them, help tell them, or be them. Knowledge is not a product to us but a relation, something we feel responsible to care for and enact.

This exhibition aims to involve visitors in a critical and shared process of speculation and imagination by presenting alternative perspectives on reality and by presenting lore and stories as a collective place of knowing. When we are stories, and we are relations, there is no beginning and there is no end.

This project situates itself at the multiple intersection of 2 PhD research projects, our design practices, and a body of independent research and experience that has over the years reinforced our relations to a place, its human and more-than-human realities, and its stories.

We wanted to thank everyone involved in helping us realise it, and who continue to support our ongoing PhD research, with special thanks to: Carlotta, Lorenzo, Sara, Zamba, Pina, Francesca, Nicole, Giuliano, Flavio, the cave, our friends and loved ones.