Miu Miu’s newest Literary Membership in Milan explores the politics of want

One of the crucial hotly anticipated of Salone del Cellular’s host of erudite, brand-backed occasions might be happening 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 Need’ and can invite audiences to have interaction within the topic via 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 attracts from the custom of literary circles and creative 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 via the writing of two internationally famend authors, Annie Ernaux and the late Ama Ata Aidoo, by way of conversations with modern writers, moderated by Lou Stoppard and Nadia Beard. The road-up of audio system consists of Megan Nolan, Lea Melandri, Annabelle Hirsch, Jennifer Guerra, Wayetu Moore, Francesca Marciano, Gloria Wekker, and Elisa Cuter.

Miu Miu Literary Membership at Milan Design Week 2026

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 ‘Need After AI’, which can look at want’s roots earlier than sexuality, and the methods it’s being re-oriented in direction of abstractions produced by synthetic intelligence. ‘We discover ourselves in a scenario when what we’re speculated to want is a logical inference, a prediction based mostly on information,’ Gorinunova tells Wallpaper*. ‘Personalisation, advice methods 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 will we speak about 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 fearful 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 speak concerning the messy area between “sure” and “no” that all of us have to barter, and concerning the significance of fascinated with pleasure, pleasure, discovery, curiosity – moderately than fascinated with consent as the one measure of sexual ethics.’

Miu Miu Literary Membership has been an area for rigorous dialog round feminist points, via a literary lens, since its inception in 2024. Earlier editions of the symposium have centred on ladies’s schooling and writing as a artistic medium, and the format is normally 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 Schooling in Ghana Ama Ata Aidoo will kind the premise of this week’s discussions.

‘Annie Ernaux’s frank and unflinching accounts of extraordinary – 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 fascinating,’ says Angel. ‘And Ama Ata Aidoo’s poems are so pithy and reverberating. Whom Do We Thank For Girls’s Conferences? is great – “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 want a brand new political vocabulary and instruments to cope with this new scenario. Need just isn’t essentially “good”. Folks can discover themselves in frameworks the place what they want is incompatible with who they’re, and their want can undo them.’ Angel continues, ‘I feel conversations concerning the relationship between politics and the intimate, between tradition and the advanced textures of our inside worlds, are so vital. I feel they must be in every single place! However after all we’re all beset by the quandaries of the second we’re in, which includes 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 more durable than ever.’