BASE Milano

BASE Milano is a cultural and creative hub located in Milan, Italy. It is a project of cultural contamination between arts, enterprise, technology and social innovation, which became one of the most important urban regeneration projects in Europe, by returning back to the city 12.000 square meters of the historic spaces of the former Ansaldo factory.

Established in 2016, BASE has consolidated its vocation as a centre for the production and co-production of cultural initiatives with social value, both as a creative hub (a place dedicated to professionals in the creative industries) and as a community hub, an open and accessible place offering services to citizens. Over the years, the 12,000 square meters of the building have been activated to host permanent functions: a workspace, ateliers and an artist's residencies, spaces dedicated to the music industries, an auditorium, performance halls, a large study room open to the public, learning rooms dedicated to training projects, a bar-restaurant and a hostel.

While always geared towards producing social, cultural, and relational value, BASE is characterized by a threefold soul, which manifests itself transversally in its programming and structure. In the production and co-production of culture, BASE mainly acts as an actor and a hybridizer, whether by directly exercising its ability to generate change or by doing together with others, through contamination processes and sharing practices. It also functions as an enabler – facilitating third parties in bringing about innovation.

Counting a community of about 400.000 visitors annually, BASE works in collaboration with important cultural actors to offer the city a 365-day Public Program program consisting of talks, workshops, performances, concerts, and events.

Since 2020 BASE also promotes a transdisciplinary residency program – ranging from the arts to design – that supports the creation of a creative community. These artists residencies constitute an opportunity to experiment with multidisciplinary approaches and foster connections between emerging artists/designers, more established realities and local communities

What Makes Us Unique?

BASE’s core values are plurality, interaction and innovation.

Since its birth, BASE’s mission has been to generate new considerations for the 21st century city and forge new interactions between different art practices, disciplines and languages. BASE has therefore positioned itself as a prototype of a new cultural institution, characterized by certain elements of innovativeness in terms of size, business model, breadth of functions, flows and mixing of heterogeneous audiences, and connections with cultural and creative industries.
BASE’s hybrid and transdisciplinary nature are first and foremost reflected in its content proposals and through the useof different creative languages. Yet, what makes BASE’s productions truly unique is that they function as a training ground for the growth of new talent.

Since its very beginning, BASE established itself as a modern “cultural factory", enhancing a virtuous circle between each stage of the value chain of cultural production, from project design and incubation up to the final delivery to the public, while providing a fully co-produced cultural program, developed with local cultural organizations, community members of all ages, backgrounds, and religions, as well as public administration.

With a long-term scope in mind, BASE has expressed its middle-term vision in its artistic direction plan for the triennium 2023-2025 – epitomized by the expression “Same Same But Different”. Within this framework, an important step for BASE has been the public presentation of An I.D.E.A. of cultural centre. Manifesto for a plural cultural institution, in November 2023. Consistent with the UNESCO acronym (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility), BASE committed to the realization of a manifesto, formulated on the urgency and the will to explore new approaches in constructing an artistic institution that is truly diverse and accessible. An institution that serves as amplifier for voices and energies who often sit at “the periphery” of public life – thus creating space for expression and narration, around which to build communities capable of generating social transformations. The goal of this manifesto is to widen the area of what falls under the definition of “culture”, starting with those who have access to cultural professions, and thus actively shape the sector.

With this very aim, in 2023 BASE has also started a series of projects focused on the GEN Z target, adolescents and young adults, with particular attention to the 14/23 age range. These projects had the scope to enhance the cultural participation of youth, through actions that involve them as critical and active protagonists in the city’s cultural processes.

People