People and their lives, not trends, are the driving force animating Ikea's research: this was declared at the opening of the Ikea Festival of the Milano Design Week 2022, and this is confirmed by the curatorial choice of the brand’s senior designers and set designers to literally invade Base Milano with a true landscape made up of different scenes of life, micro-stories of domesticity, be them universally abstract or more specifically Milanese, all capable of telling us, by combining the Ikea collections with materials from the everyday, how we live, and how we will like to live.

Ögonblick, the glance, the snapshot that imprisons a moment, is the name of the first exhibition, scattering between the inside and the outside of Base a collection of five , each of them picturing a precise moment in human life.

A giant disco ball is parked in front of the entrance, disclosing into a First Time Single situation, in fact a landscape of pillows where people sleep, work, eat, relax and socialise. Then, inside an igloo of boxes, the life of a new couple takes its first steps, the objects of two lives mingling in an enthusiastic combination, and nothing will delay “that champagne picnic on the carpet”. Then what happens in case a family grows?, No doubt that the combination of this question with the Ikea imaginary immediately translates into the iconic Ball Pool^TM, which in fact invades the central courtyard of the Festival (becoming a stage if need be). But few standards are as unrealistic as the concept itself of the nuclear family — we are human beings, not turtledoves: so the protagonist of another Living Single story invites us into its box all uniformly textured with the flowers of one same fabric (their world, their rules. Who are you to question them?), and a long collective table winds its way through the spaces, telling us of a multigenerational coexistence against which no will ever stand.

The exhibition invites us to refocus on the experience of our living, on what generates and which are its components: How do we create a better everyday?, the guests of the Democratic Design Talks in the cinema area ask themselves, recounting those rituals, those practices and even those objects that connect them to different places they end up calling home. This is told to us by the casa di ringhiera (a historical housing typology of northern Italian cities where long balconies connect the entrances of different apartments) set up behind the large ledwall in the central courtyard, a living collection of three stories of living: three very Milanese stories this time, but also universal in their being very contemporary. They are three First Homes — this the name of the exhibition — the scenarios of three “first times” in the stories of very different lives, which, however, having all found themselves living in the same housing blocks, also love to share convivial moments with each other or, why not?, to share sustainable purchasing groups. 

Alessandro is a young single man from Palermo, a newly graduated startupper at the beginning of his career: big dreams, and little money, generate in the 19 square metres of his house a minimal but smart environment, born from the passions of its inhabitant but also attentive to the reuse of materials. In just a few more metres (23!) lives Fatima, 36, from Morocco, together with her seven-year-old son Hassan, born in Italy: at school he is fascinated by everything he learns about ecology, he passes it on to his mother, and their home becomes an example of a small sustainable domestic ecosystem, cosy but attentive to saving and sharing. 35 square metres only are then sufficient to extend that discourse on the non-normativity of cohabitation already opened by Ögonblick: Minato, a Japanese chef, and Patrizia, an Italian musician — a meditative soul, detached from objects, and a volcanic one who wants them around to remind her of the beauty of affection — do not force each other to adapt to the other’s difference, and manage to combine in a minimal space their two very distinct vocations for living.