Miu Miu Literary Membership in Milan explores the politics of need

Some of the hotly anticipated of Salone del Cell’s host of erudite, brand-backed occasions will likely be going down between Wednesday 22 April – Friday 24 April, 2026, within the type of the Miu Miu Literary Membership. The fourth iteration of this bookish salon takes as its theme the ‘Politics of Want’ and can invite audiences to interact within the topic by way of a sequence of conversations, lectures, and a public studying room with a curated choice of printed matter.

That is the third event that Miu Miu has introduced the membership – which pulls from the custom of literary circles and inventive collective – to Milan’s Circolo Filologico Milanese, an establishment devoted, appropriately, to language (one other Miu Miu Literary Membership was held in Shanghai in 2025). This spring’s occasion will look at its theme partially by way of the writing of two internationally famend authors, Annie Ernaux and the late Ama Ata Aidoo, by way of conversations with up to date writers, moderated by Lou Stoppard and Nadia Beard. The road-up of audio system contains Megan Nolan, Lea Melandri, Annabelle Hirsch, Jennifer Guerra, Wayetu Moore, Francesca Marciano, Gloria Wekker, and Elisa Cuter.

The three-day occasion additionally options two lectures: Professor Olga Gorinunova, a cultural theorist working with technological cultures, media philosophy and aesthetics, will current a chat titled ‘Want After AI’, which can look at need’s roots earlier than sexuality, and the methods it’s being re-oriented in the direction of abstractions produced by synthetic intelligence. ‘We discover ourselves in a scenario when what we’re speculated to need is a logical inference, a prediction primarily based on information,’ Gorinunova tells Wallpaper*. ‘Personalisation, suggestion programs and profiling all work on this foundation. They information us to issues we supposedly need, inform us the “fact” about ourselves, however these truths are produced by computation.’

Following that, ’How can we discuss consent?’ is the title of literary non-fiction author and psychotherapist Katherine Angel’s lecture, a continuation of points raised in her 2021 e-book Tomorrow Intercourse Will Be Good Once more. ‘Put up-#MeToo, there was a significant reassertion of the significance of consent. However I felt anxious about rhetoric that locations a burden on ladies to say themselves sexually, as a strategy to preserve themselves secure,’ Angel particulars to Wallpaper*. ‘In my lecture, I discuss in regards to the messy area between “sure” and “no” that all of us have to barter, and in regards to the significance of serious about pleasure, pleasure, discovery, curiosity – moderately than serious about consent as the one measure of sexual ethics.’

Miu Miu Literary Membership has been an area for rigorous dialog round feminist points, by way of a literary lens, since its inception in 2024. Earlier editions of the symposium have centred on ladies’s training and writing as a artistic medium, and the format is often devoted to the oeuvres of chosen writers – the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Sibilla Aleramo, Alba De Céspedes, Fumiko Enchi, and Eileen Chang have all served as entry factors to previous occasions. Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and author, poet, and former Secretary for Training in Ghana Ama Ata Aidoo will type the idea of this week’s discussions.

‘Annie Ernaux’s frank and unflinching accounts of abnormal – however momentous – experiences are so resonant and highly effective, for thus many readers of a large span of generations, which I at all times discover attention-grabbing,’ says Angel. ‘And Ama Ata Aidoo’s poems are so pithy and reverberating. Whom Do We Thank For Girls’s Conferences? is fantastic – “We had been / solely ourselves; every alone as after we had been born, and / shall be, after we died”. I imply! What a line!’

On the prescience of the theme, Gorinunova tells Wallpaper* that: ‘We’d like a brand new political vocabulary and instruments to cope with this new scenario. Want just isn’t essentially “good”. Individuals can discover themselves in frameworks the place what they need is incompatible with who they’re, and their need can undo them.’ Angel continues, ‘I believe conversations in regards to the relationship between politics and the intimate, between tradition and the complicated textures of our inside worlds, are so necessary. I believe they should be all over the place! However in fact we’re all beset by the quandaries of the second we’re in, which entails a paradoxical surplus of discourse about supremely urgent political questions, and a simultaneous failure of that discourse to have traction. In some methods, it’s simpler than ever for discourse to flow into, however in different methods, change appears tougher than ever.’