DOPO? laboro, Rooting/Radicarsi

Developed in October 2023 in Milan, Rooting/Radicarsi was a multi-faceted project consisting of a solo exhibition and an artist residency at DOPO?, a cultural center located in the Corvetto district. Curated by Mr.Lawrence (Annalisa Rosso and Francesco Mainardi) and Salvatore Peluso, the festival was positioned exactly six months away from Milan Design Week. This intentional temporal distance allowed the studio to engage in a "peripheral view" of the design world, focusing on a slower, more critical analysis of production, craft, and urban integration.

The project was conceptualized as a device for building relationships between the cultural center and its immediate neighborhood. During the residency, the design team focused on a process of "radical grounding," navigating the local social and urban context of Corvetto to identify discarded materials and collaborate with local artisans. The studio’s intervention sought to overcome the dualism between the handmade and the mass-produced, proposing hybridizations that reject industrialism as a purely extractive process and instead embrace it as a source of "urban mining."

The centerpiece of the residency was the creation of a site-specific Sound System, designed to remain permanently at DOPO?. Technically, this object followed the studio’s signature "Sistema de Sonido" logic: a formal exercise born from material availability. Utilizing salvaged plywood panels and leaving technical elements like screws and internal volumes visible, the team created a functional aggregator for the space. This sound system acted as a catalyst for social interaction, involving local productive realities and turning waste recovery into a ritual of shared listening and communal activation.

As a significant milestone in the studio’s trajectory, Rooting/Radicarsi exemplifies the team’s commitment to "pro-cycling" and hyper-local engagement. By bridging the gap between high-end collectible design and the industrial soul of a neighborhood like Corvetto, the studio demonstrated that design can be a powerful tool for rooting oneself in a territory. The project remains a definitive example of how the studio uses its residency format to question the economic and social status quo, proving that alternative ways forward are found through proximity and critical awareness.