Project Proposal

➝ What do you want to make?

A slow and inevitable process of depopulation is affecting internal areas and remote villages in Italy. Started with the Industrial boom in the 70s, it's related to the seek for better and apparently more stable working opportunities, which were provided by the major urban centres with their industrial capacity and development plans. The result is a huge, forgotten heritage that could be estimated to be more than 6000 ghost villages, just in Italy.

Now that we may have some concerns or doubts about the industrial developments and the consumeristic drifts bring by them, together with the re-evaluation of the spaces we inhabit and the natural resources we try to control, could it be the moment to re-think and re-imagine ways for living and working together? Maybe by thinking of the future as a constellation of small, almost self-sustainable communities, which could easily organize themself around urgent issues and real needs? Working in a smaller scale helps us to try out, engaging directly with the local people and heritage, receiving direct feedbacks to move instantly forward to the next step.

I want to provide a set of tools, local infrastructures and physical spaces (in the form of an art residency) in order to promote creative production within small scale environments such as rural and remote areas, to respond to their need for cultural revitalization, intending to resonate with their cultural heritage and local traditions as an important tool for understanding the present. While braiding in the specific pre-existent and micro-territorial context, the project helps to define new possibilities for artistic and cultural developments, both for the territory and artists.

➝ How do you plan to make it?

My intention is to bring different methodologies, local services and publishing practices into action. First, by working on the idea of Archive, which inevitably brings the question of how to collect and archive material from the past, while sustaining the collecting process of what is being "produced" during the residency. Maybe by

"inventing new systems of image description and categorisation; inventing new interfaces to image collections; inventing new kinds of images which go beyond such familiar types as a still photograph or a digital video; approaching the new super-human scale of visual data available"

as important creative opportunities to unfold e re-organize past, present, and future contents.

For these specified purposes, I will create my own local system of infrastructures, based on Raspberry Pi computers, which could be used first to:

1. create a local network for file and data sharing
2. host collective-based tools such as Etherpad - which could turn automatically into HTML based publication
3. build and organize an Archive (What then would/could be accessible from the outside? Being accessible only locally could be also a statement)

The idea is to implement policies and measures that could be appropriate for the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural heritage, creative expression and supporting the spring of new values in the specific territory.

➝ What is your timetable?

➝ Why do you want to make it?

➝ Who can help you and how?

➝ Relation to previous practice

➝ Relation to a larger context

➝ References/bibliography

• GLOBAL TOOLS 1973 – 1975, Valerio Borgonuovo e Silvia Franceschini
• How Do We Make Art Of Databases? - Making art of databases - Anne Nigten, p.8
• Metadating the Image – Making art of databases – Lev Manovich, p.14
• You Need Art When You Build a City, Hanne Hagenaars, https://laps-rietveld.nl/?p=552
• New Creative Community, The Art of Cultural Development