NABA announces “Notes on Becoming – Cartographies, Migrations and the Archive”, the Degree Show by students from NABA’s Visual Arts Area, on view from May 22 to 25 at Fabbrica del Vapore (Via Giulio Cesare Procaccini 4, Milan). The opening event will take place on May 22 at 6:30 PM in the Sala Colonne. 

The exhibition, open daily from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, features 32 works and 3 performances selected from students of the BA in Painting and Visual Arts and the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from the Milan and Rome campuses, taking on the roles of both artists and curators. This show marks the third chapter of a broader exhibition journey that began with “(Im)possible Ecologies” at the Botanical Garden of Rome in 2022 and continued with “Voicing the Archive” at Triennale Milano in 2023. 

Following the exhibition, a conference will be held on May 29 from 3:00 to 6:30 PM at NABA’s Rome campus (Via Ostiense, 92), offering an in-depth exploration of the themes presented in the exhibition. The event will feature contributions from six Rome-based and four Milan-based student curators. 

“Notes on Becoming – Cartographies, Migrations and the Archive”: the exhibition 

“Notes on Becoming” aims to explore the complex network of connections between memory, the body, and migration. Within this shifting cartography—shaped by mobility and global interconnection—a fundamental question emerges: what makes us feel at home? A question with no single answer. Home is not a fixed place, but a dynamic condition, a space of negotiation between memory and desire, permanence and transition. Home, then, is not a noun, but a verb—an action, a state of movement. 

Taking the archive—the principal custodian of memory—as a space of transformation (Foucault, The Order of Discourse, 1969), the very notion of memory is shaped by the movement of the body through space. This movement is never solely physical: territorial displacement also becomes a journey of self-discovery, an endless play of reflections, where the migrant attempts to reconstruct their place of origin, traditions, food, and rituals. The body becomes engaged in a form of repetition that is not merely an end in itself: not just a personal archive, but also a political terrain where experiences, tensions, and possibilities are inscribed. Borders become mobile, identities fluid, and normative ideas of belonging are overturned. It is precisely this tension between migration and repetition—between body and memory—that forms the code of an open relationship between present and identity, offering a choreographic experience of memory that radically redefines the past, present, and future. 

The works on display unfold along a path of perpetual ebb and flow, following the becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-machine, and becoming-refrain theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in “Mille Plateaux” (“A Thousand Plateaus”, 1980). Body and memory merge into filaments that grow without aiming to reach a final form: these multiple becomings trace lines of flight from fixed categories of identity and form, opening up to unpredictable relationships and new subjectivities that challenge established and stable orders. Virtual and potential, the body externalises its own affective constellation, turning personal experience into an emotional geography. 

By investigating the many facets of migratory phenomena, “Notes on Becoming” becomes a threshold into a fluid, non-hierarchical space. Viewers are invited to let go of their own centrality, to renegotiate their position, and to engage in this perpetual movement as in a dance. Within this endless flow, becoming—an intersection of temporalities, places, and memories—reveals itself as a constant openness to change, a generative principle of freedom and liberation, and perhaps the only way to inhabit. 

“Notes on Becoming”: event details 

Exhibition 
Thursday, May 22 – Sunday, May 25, 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM 
Opening: Thursday, May 22, from 6:30 PM 
Fabbrica del Vapore, Sala Colonne 
Via Giulio Cesare Procaccini 4, Milan 
Free entry, booking recommended 

Conference 
Wednesday, May 29, 3:00 PM 
NABA Rome Campus 
Via Ostiense 92, Rome 

Free entry, booking recommended here

Cover: ©Archivio Uliano Lucas