MILAN — Miuccia Prada’s interest in women’s, and more generally, humans’ lives and condition has been integral to her work at the Prada and Miu Miu brands for decades.

An art enthusiast and patron of the arts with her husband Patrizio Bartelli through their Fondazione Prada art institution, the Italian designer has increasingly leveraged Miu Miu as a platform for in-depth cultural exploration.

As the official partner of Art Basel Paris’ Public Program for the second year, the brand will bring “30 Blizzards.,” a new project by British artist Helen Marten, to the modern and contemporary art show.

The exhibit — a combination of sculpture, video installations, libretto and movement, all of which contribute to shaping the message equally — champions “radical human optimism,” Marten told WWD.

“I think the fundamental implication of making art, and specially making art that asserts itself to require an audience is embracing a voice of explicit care, or a voice that sort of speaks suggestively to empowerment through dialog and conversation,” she said.

“We do live in an incredibly violent and polarized world. There’s absolutely no denying that it’s very difficult, and the wonder of artmaking is, hopefully, that it engenders a space where radical and important conversation can be had about what that means and how to act with an ethical voice, or within an atmosphere of care. I think care is a very important word, and we’re very afraid often to use it,” she said.

The exhibit has been a few months in the making, with early contacts between Prada and the Turner Prize-winning Marten occurring last March. However, the artist — who has always been fascinated by both the aesthetics and political qualities of fashion — had been following the designer’s work for quite some time.

“There are so few sorts of visionaries whose generosity, whose intellectual content, whose championing of female, marginalized voices, is quite so prolific and generous as Mrs. Prada’s [and that] straddles both the technological progress, the social mobility of fashion and clothing across something that collaborates in a deeply intellectual way with arts or literature or film,” continued Marten.

“30 Blizzards.” is a multilayered and multipronged, non-linear work that is not necessarily intended for straightforward deciphering. It reflects Marten’s intention to trigger different emotions and interpretations in the audience, as well as reflect the unique life experiences of each individual.

“This entire project has so many different overlapping facets, so many sort of material conditions, so many existential emotions, and so many different narrative archetypes that are all deeply sort of interlocked and contingent on one another,” she said.

The exhibit’s title may suggest Marten is addressing the current social, cultural and geopolitical turmoil, when in fact it’s a reflection of the frenzied and multifaceted emotional dimension of human beings.

Blizzard, she said, is a graphically and onomatopoeically pleasant word, but it also references a weather condition that is “temperamental. It is a word that is full of portent, full of mystery, full of possibility for, you know, darkness in a way, but most fundamentally, the word blizzard is a metaphorical reference to human beings and their sort of changeable emotional temperament,” Marten explained.

The number 30 is not only an overt reference to the 30 performers in the exhibit, but also a key to unlocking the show’s underlying message. “It’s the interpretive tool for the wider logic of the project,” the artist explained. In numerology, 30 symbolizes infinity and the exhibition is conceived as a continuum, to be experienced as a whole but also in tidbits, without losing the overall messaging, she said.

“30 Blizzards.” marks the first show where Marten is exploring performance, a two-hour choreography of bodies, conceived in collaboration with theater and opera director Fabio Cherstich and composer Beatrice Dillon.

The exhibition is physically structured around five diptychs, each on a podium, juxtaposing five sculptures and five video installations. The five podiums are scattered in linear succession across the Palais d’Iéna, the headquarters of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council and the usual venue of Miu Miu runway shows. The space is looped by a moving industrial distribution track loaded with boxes, books, speakers and clothing, among other objects.

Each video-sculpture pair references a chronological moment of life, from childhood to adulthood and older age, as well as the archetypal experiences connected to each, including parenthood, sexuality, interiority, and loss.

While the sculptures are agglomerates and amalgams of ordinary objects, the videos are short vignettes, narrative monologues from the point of view of the timeline’s protagonists: the child, the parent, the lover, the patient, the widow. They are played one at a time, voiced by women, but Marten said the show is not confined to the exploration of the feminine world.

“I’m not using female experience in this sense of like a binary position, but more like a metaphor. This project is about human beings,” she said.

“The libretto is written almost like an amorphous strip, so that you can experience its full arc, but you’re also invited to move fluidly within it. So, you can enter at the beginning. You can enter at the end; you can enter just as a crescendo is happening. And no matter where you enter, you still feel like you’re experiencing a full narrative of the piece,” Marten said.

“There’s never a sort of ending point, you know, it’s one kind of continual cycle of information.”

The videos’ voiceovers are overlapped by what the artist called a “flock” of 30 performers — a diverse group, “very fluid and nonlinear,” she said, that includes men, women, non-binary characters, people from all walks of life — moving freely through the space, gesturing, voicing or singing refrains, individually or in chorus. Each performer is assigned a character or trope. Some embody weather phenomena, others animals or celestial moods.

“We are creating a city in a way or the idea of a town, whereby each of the fundamental components of that city are represented by one of the 30 characters,” Marten explained. “There are archetypes in the sense of characters that you might recognize from a more literary context, like the mother or the baker or the delivery driver.  And then there are more metaphysical qualities, like magic, and of course, there’s weatherscapes like snow or rain.”

The exhibition has to be experienced without seeking a closed-loop narrative to walk home with.

“It’s this sort of continual arc of of experience, really, so that there isn’t an explicit story, it’s more a sort of set of observations, I would say, collective watching in a way, to sort of understand the material, atomic qualities of the world around us,” she said.

A graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins and Oxford University, the Macclesfield, U.K.-born Marten has built a prolific art career across multiple media, spanning sculpture, painting, drawing, video and writing, which landed her collective exhibits at major cultural institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Tate in London.

“I think fundamentally, the things I return to over and over again are… text and image, the two ever fundamental building blocks of where I start with my work,” Marten said. “Semiotic expression, or realms of sort of deviancy that exist outside of classic binary normative language, is something that I’m really interested in,” the artist noted.

The exhibit will be on show between Oct. 22 and 26 at the Palais d’Iéna, with two talks planned for the first day.

For its inaugural participation at the Art Basel Paris Public Program last year, Miu Miu unveiled “Tales & Tellers,” billed as an intersection between “fashion, cinema and art” conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.