IED Square Fest

Conversations on Love in IED
26 and 27 September 2024

Two days of online appointments, the culmination of the multidisciplinary teaching project dedicated to third-year students to accompany them towards their Thesis Project.

IED Square was born twelve years ago as an experimental project of Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan dedicated to third-year students to accompany them towards the Thesis Project: the canonical subdivisions of the courses of origin of students are annulled, the path for a week becomes transversal: the courses of Fashion, Design, Visual Arts and Communication are mixed in a moment of deepening and opening at the same time. A square to meet, share knowledge and reach out to others, outside the school, in the city, in the world.

Thanks to IED Square we have crossed the main trajectories of the contemporary world, those that inevitably influence the culture of the project together with our own experiences.

Over the years IED Square has evolved, involving the other Italian IED venues in Rome, Florence, Cagliari and Turin, reaching an audience of over 1500 students.

This year IED Square is divided into 2 days of unconventional culture and thought, also available online and in dual language English/Italian, to read the present with the desire to invite us to be protagonists of the future. Unconventional days of study.

A series of reflections that start from Pier Paolo Pasolini's Comizi d'amore and Natasha Lunn's essay Conversations on Love and become occasions for encounters, new beginnings and preparations for new departures.

Discover the appointments

Where do we start this year?

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Comizi d'amore and Natasha Lunn's essay Conversations on Love.

Comizi d'amore (Love Meetings) (1964) is the documentary film by Pier Paolo Pasolini that launched and shaped the genre of the investigative film and with which the author wished to shed light was the concept of sexuality and its perception in Italy, travelling around the country and carrying out an anthropological investigation in search of voices from different social, cultural and geographical areas, showing the spontaneity of the subjects interviewed: children, young people, the elderly.

The sixty years that separate us from Comizi d'amore (Love Meetings) can all be felt, and not only in Italy. Customs, language, habits, rights, relationships and society have changed so much that it is necessary to rewrite the whole, a new investigative journey that allows us to return an up-to-date, albeit contradictory and fragmentary, picture.

In order to do this, we have also asked for help from a very well-known and recent and above all very different essay-interview: Conversations on Love, a 2021 book by British journalist Natasha Lunn .

Different approaches and points of observation: Pasolini tackles sexuality with an anthropological eye, Lunn investigates love relationships with a psychological and intimist approach, but in both cases the register of the interview is used, which is the leitmotif that allows us to read at first hand the steps forward compared to the past and the new resistances.

IED follows these tracks and proposes a new and topical restitution through encounters with people who have been very in

Schedule of meetings

Thursday 26th September

9.30am> The taboos of male sexuality - Video HERE
with Diego Passoni, voice of Radio Deejay, host and author, and Nicola Macchione, urologist and scientific communicator.

They wrote a book: Pene, maschile plurale and created a podcast: Cazzi Nostri, together with them we will discover what male issues are, despite the ongoing gender liberation, about which there are still unmentionable stereotypes.

11.00am> Cinema and TV series, between sex and feeling
with Paola Jacobbi, journalist and film critic and Ivan Cotroneo, writer and screenwriter.

Many of us have learned to extricate ourselves from under the sheets or to manage a romantic evening, thanks to films, first on the big screen and then on the small one. Why do we need to represent certain situations and what are the titles that involve us most today?

2.30pm > Eros and theatre - Video HERE
with Luca Scarlini, essayist, performer and playwright.

Since ancient Greece, theater has been one of the first languages to talk about Eros and still today on stages around the world it is one of the most represented themes. Let's try to understand why.

16.00pm> The spaces of pleasure - Video HERE
with Lorenzo Carni and Elisa Ferrari, respectively public program project manager and head of project development and fundraising of BASE Milano.

After an internal and external process aimed at making BASE a cultural center open to the themes of inclusiveness, diversity, equity and accessibility, a plan of activities was developed aimed at performers under 35 who put bodies at the center of the tale. The resulting practices have led to insights into the dimensions of pleasure which have led them to produce formats that go beyond semantic boundaries and border in a liquid manner between different languages.

5.30pm > Me / We. The Design of Relations - Video HERE
with Angela Rui, design curator & Head MA programs Milan and Giulia Tomasello, designer and mentor at the MA Product Design.

By considering ourselves part of the web of life, can we imagine forms of radical interdependence with other living beings and design kinder relationships? Starting from an ontological introduction of relational design, the focus is on the radical changes that are taking place in women's bodies and their health through innovation between biotechnology and wearable technology.

Friday 27th September

9.30am > Art and desire, an indissoluble combination - Video HERE
with Valentina Tosoni, journalist and curator and Sonia Andresano, visual artist and Luca De Gaetano artist and architect.

Art has represented and sublimated themes of love or sexuality in many forms throughout history. Artists have personified perversions and desires for love, making their lives a living work of art between fiction and obsession.

11.00am > Generation of Love - Video HERE
with Matteo B.Bianchi, writer and TV author.

Matteo's most successful novel has just returned to bookstores due to its timeliness: a young man talks about his adolescence and youth, his first discoveries and friendships, his relationships with his family, with school and university, his first disappointments, the first clashes. A lively generational framework in which it will be easy to identify and play. The author has fun, imitates soap operas, makes fun of himself and his life. His prose imitates the world of songs. The result is an absolutely unprecedented vision of today's young people.

2.30pm > I just called to say I love you. Love, sex, songs and us
with Alba Solaro, journalist and professor and Giulia Cavaliere, author, journalist and music critic.

Music is the most visceral language in sentimental matters, each of us has a song that reminds us of a past relationship, or a perfect soundtrack for the most intimate moments. In this meeting we will review which songs have marked entire generations and their love stories.

4.00pm > Glimpses of the future - Video HERE
with Tobia Rossi, playwright and screenwriter and Gianluca Nativo, teacher and writer.

Both authors of coming-of-age novels will help us understand what can happen in our heads when it's time to grow up. Between doubts, fears and the desire to look far ahead.

5.30pm > Love rallies - Video HERE
with Stefano Ghittoni, record and radio producer, and Fulvio Ravagnani co-curator of IED Square Fest & Head of IED Milano Communication School.

From Pasolini's film to the well-known Sunday radio program on Radio Popolare: Comizi d'amore. Sixty minutes of music and cinematic dialogues transposed, isolated, deconstructed to create new emotional forms of listening.