"Habitat is not just an opportunity to work together with other realities. Habitat tries to find a new way of doing it. Habitat makes the place alive through the practices of all its participants. It is a way to experiment new, hybrid practices and cultural communities, extremely necessary in our contemporaneity. For this reason, it's not just a matter of curating projects in Tredozio, Rocca, Portico and S. Benedetto, but a community of people who know each other, building bridges by sharing a place, imagining new forms of existence for our future. "

(Parasite2.0)

Cà de Monti, Tredozio. Pic by Riccardo Fantoni Montana, 2021

Questioning

On a theoretical layer: How the publishing process, (as a means to unfold and re-tell the reality) could create new, cultural roots for social and micro-territorial developments? What kind of infrastructures a residency and collective workshop would need in order to facilitate the sharing of processes and knowledge? And how they could be used to re-think the future we live in? Could a constellation of smaller eco-systems be the way to decentralize political and monetary power, recalibrating our lives based on urgent and real needs? What could we learn from smaller realities such as rural villages in order to build new, modern and almost self-reliant communities? How the circulation of knowledge, processes and results achieved during the residency could be turned into concrete actions which could help both the local community and the artists' development? How the set of traditions and local heritage could be used as a set of tools for better understanding the present?

On a practical layer: How to amplify territorial-based narrations? How to approach local archives? And how to create new, vernacular imaginaries? A journey into the building up of a new, ultra-territorial community-based model aiming to re-create the ideal environments for a participative, cultural development.

Project Proposal

Thesis Outline

✐ Statement

I want to write this text to narrate the processes, both theoretically and practically I'm going through for building Habitat, an ultra-territorial residency and collective workshop which take place in Tredozio in Italy, which aims to develop new possible cultural roots for the territory, while valuing the actual vulnerability of human coexistence within the landscape he's been creating.


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                                                                       /-|    Fantasy    |-\                        
+----------------+                                                   /-  +---------------+  -\   +-----------------+
|                |       +---------------+       +---------------+ /-    +---------------+    -\ |                 |
| External World |-------| Understanding |-------|    Memory     --------|   Invention   |-------|   Imagination   |
|                |       +---------------+       +---------------+ \-    +---------------+    -/ |                 |
+----------------+                                                   \-  +---------------+  -/   +-----------------+
        |                                                              \-|  Creativity   |-/              |         
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        |----------------------------------|        Production       |-------------------------------------         
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✐Introduction

In December 2020 I've been reached by the Vice-major of Tredozio, a village on the edges of Appennines between Emilia Romagna and Tuscany (Italy) - away from industrial flatlands and congested urban agglomerations, where the hills and the cultivated fields start to leave space in favour of (still) not urbanised lands and resilient eco-systems. The purpose of our meeting was to brainstorm ideas and possibilities for a cultural-rooted programme to start there. From that moment, I've been constantly busy thinking about a small-scale approach for publishing, which emerges from the local specificity trying to resonate with the actual ultra-territorial potential. This chapter will introduce the overall framework of my research, by locating it in a specific time and space condition.

1.

✐ Mapping the Present, Understanding the local conditions

The places we inhabit correspond to a specific stratification of social, cultural, economic and natural layers, which outline the ever-going process of building, destroying and modifying the space we live, translating it into different systems shaping our cities. According to Ugo La Pietra in "LIVING IN THE CITY", the commercial, the streams (viability, urbanism), the ludic, the cultural, the informative and the "decompression" one are the main systems that define our ways of living and related behaviours. I would refer to this structure to unfold the local context and analyze the actual, local conditions in which my project is going to be rooted.

✐ The potential relevance of Habitat in that specific context

Departing from the previous analysis, I'll bring some questions and reflections around the contextualization of my project within the local boundaries.

✐The first contact with the community

After understanding the context and starting to map out the different possibilities offered by this environment and the support of the three municipalities, my intention is to show up and describe the first edition of Habitat by providing an overall map of the participants, approaches, methodologies, interventions sites, projects and prototypes, emphasizing the process rather than the end result. Affordance as a target. The aesthetic is not as a purpose.

2.

✐ Mapping the first edition' outcomes

The pilot edition already offered a wide range of opportunities to live, understand, create and publish within the small-scale reality. The process moves forward by collecting, analyzing, and then re-elaborating all the material that's been initiated during the first month of residency (August 2021). Several podcasts have been recorded and broadcasted, hundreds of pictures realized, while just a few video cameras have been documenting, some wood-cut sculptures yet inhabited our small village. The seeds for a long-term action have been planted, but the processes need to be narrated.

✐ Possibilities for a partecipative action

What was missing in the first edition, due to an often recurrent lack of time, was the active participation of the local community in the making. Apart from the workshops, in which the local community had the opportunity to take part as participants, most of the projects, prototypes and actions sprung spontaneously from the building up of relations between the residents and the accessibility-proximity of local resources. The local community has taken part of the publishing process only as a "spectator", creating a possible distance between the artists and themself. How the local community could be actively involved in the process of collecting, shaping and publishing knowledge, while aiming to restore a communal collective space of social, shared engagement? How to encourage horizontal, local circulations of knowledge (and why not, essential goods), while building bridges with the world?

✐ Tooling the local bubble: Local circulation and ultra-territorial bridges

Conclusions

✐ Self-reflected local implicancy or bootstrappable model?

Thesis Drafts

Considerations

Conceptual Outline

"..social practice artists create forms of living that activate communities and advance public awareness of pressing social issues." (Thompson, 2012, p.8)

Could the impact of different ultra-territorial publishing practices departing from remote, small-scaled areas offer new cultural trajectories and social developments to apply on a wider scale? What the curator Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s described as "the tendency to make art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social context", also known as Relational Aesthetics, inevitably takes into practice while considering the sources for inspirations and the spaces for local-publishing. And then, "The interconnectivity (participation, sociality and conversation and "the civic") reveals a peculiar historic moment in which these notions aren't limited to the world of contemporary art, but includes various cultural phenomena which have cropped up across the urban fabric." (Thompson, 2012, p.19)

Outline of Methodology

Guidelines

Introduction- overview [500 words]; Chapter 1 [2000 words]; Chapter 2 [2000 words]; Chapter 3 [2000 words]; Conclusion [500 words] = 7000 + Bibliography + Annotated bibliography (five texts max). Synopsis of 5 texts that will be central to the thesis. –––––––––––

Pads

GRS

' drifting memories laying on the stones of present

time dripping inside wild cave in Vercors mountains
voice of a soul processing being caught in a cloud on a hill
enormous space we can free inside and outside for selves
moment becomes present
memory dance
resonating with a mood at the door to a new year of life
water giving and washes away
everything is already there
(Perila)

User:Jacopo/secondyear

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