Thesis Drafts

Preface

Let's imagine finding a place where we can sit around a perpetual fire, welcomed by hay sofas, only with a sky above our head. Or imagine a place where it is possible to lie down on a lawn enriched with sculptures, where you can simply listen to the rustle of the stream. And again, let's imagine a garden where books are hidden among the flowers, accompanied by a slightly diffused music. A radio that bridges this isolated but real landscape with the rest of the world. Streams of images reflected on windows yellowed by time. Colorful posters dancing on the stone walls of the villages. But also Signora Maria preparing tortellinis, surrounded by exotic curious faces. A group of adventurous people who discover stones and plants of the place. A small shelter of branches in the middle of the wood. A river warehouse transformed into a museum. An old theater animated by projections and dancing figures. I am almost certain that Romagna toscana could resemble this not too strange fantasy.

Introduction

Winter on the plains has always been particularly boring, sometimes difficult. Blankets of fog all around, and visibility reduced to a minimum. I attended high school Faenza - my hometown - a city of 60,000 inhabitants in the Po Valley, that is the area that represents the highest concentration of inhabitants and economic activities in Italy, what some call "the great agricultural nothing". I still remember that the alarm clock always rang too early, at 6.50 am, because I lived in the countryside and it always took me a little longer than the others. But there was a classmate of mine, Beniamino, who woke up every morning at 5 o'clock, because he lived further away than everyone else, even outside the town from which he used to take the bus every day: Tredozio. In the winter, when he couldn't take the bus, his car often arrived with a thick layer of snow, when all around us the fog reigned supreme. This is the first memory I have of Tredozio, even before I went there for the first time. Almost 10 years later, after being living first in Turin and then Rotterdam, I find myself talking and discussing the same village, with its surroundings and neighboring villages, which seemed so far away to me, but with a new gaze and sensitivity, matured after years spent far away, in cities as large and stimulating as they are frenetic and compulsive.

When I was first approached by Lorenzo, in late December 2020, I couldn't have even imagined how that meeting would change my life. Lorenzo, while being the guy kindly helping clumsy elders at his phone shop, never breaking down the smile upon his face, he's been involved as vice-major for Tredozio from 2019. Tredozio is 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. I had the feeling that he must learn a lot in the shop, how to listen to any people complain or doubt while trying to help, concretely. Because 5G must work everywhere, and anywhere, and possibly without paying too much. That kind of approach that you would find in some other almost-paper figures making important decisions, for us, citizens of the "Bella Italia", but also citizens of the world (even if what's around borders don't bother us too much). He told me about Tredozio, and the lack of new things happening. The purpose of our meeting was to brainstorm ideas and possibilities for a cultural-rooted programme to start there, certainly not with the explicit claim to change the birth rate, but at least to think new forms for temporary living; where the idea of ​​living "isolated" can turn into an important opportunity for the future.
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-local potential. I'll bring some questions which are still resonating in my mind, and that I want to unfold in order to find potential answers and concrete strategies.

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?
Then, on a practical layer: How to amplify territorial-based narrations? How to approach local archives? And how to create new, vernacular imaginaries?

Apparently, more than the people leaving for job opportunities, what really impacts is the stillbirth rate. In fact, walking around Tredozio, it is easier to come across groups of over-sixty-year-olds intent on playing Briscola than kids playing in the street. Tredozio, together with Rocca S. Casciano and Portico and San Benedetto - who subsequently joined in our adventure, are defined as "mountain municipalities" and fall within the new parameters of the Ministry in Internal Areas, as territories with a distance by public transport more than 30 minutes from a hospital or railway, or from secondary schools. The Internal Areas in Italy include over 4,000 municipalities, with 13 million inhabitants, at risk of depopulation (especially for young people), and where the quality of the educational offer is often compromised. Their surface covers 60% of the Italian territory and hosts over 20% of the population.
(Source: https://www.ministroperilsud.gov.it/it/approfondimenti/aree-interne/cosa-sono/)

My first response was to start laying the foundations for a project that I didn't know when it would happen, let alone how. At that time I was reading Global Tools, about the rural experience of a group of radical architects who revolutionized the idea of ​​architecture and design in the midst of the economic boom, in contrast with their commercial and consumerist trends; as I'm going to explain in the next chapter. Lorenzo and this reading came together, and a year later, returning from Milan on the occasion of SPRINT - Independent Publishers and Artists' Books Salon, where we set up a space with the first editorial materialisations of Habitat, I think how much water has already passed under our bridges, despite the extreme natural and cultural drought that this area has recently suffered.

1

Habitat is a word that comes from ancient times: in Latin it means "to live" - ​​literally "he lives". In the current connotations, Habitat means:

1. In biology, the set of environmental conditions in which a specific species of animal or plant lives, or even a single stage of the biological cycle of a species; in botany, the area in which a plant finds favorable environmental conditions for its development.
2. In ecology, environment, general conditions of an urban settlement, and the complex of structures, natural and artificial, that characterize it.

By extension, the Habitat to which I refer is the result of the stratification of numerous and specific social, economic, cultural and natural factors that have defined a precise, personal identity and therefore always different and not repeatable in the case of villages and their community. These territories, authentic and imbued with local values, constitute a rare and fragile primary resource for polycentric, coordinated and sustainable development. The habitat of Italian villages is often severely tested by their marginality and disadvantaged in terms of accessibility to services and infrastructures. In this variegated and heterogeneous landscape, an immense heritage with a strong resilience capacity has developed over time, which requires far-sighted interventions and actions in order to be promoted, enhanced and extended, in order to trace new paths and cultural horizons - without affect their balance.

Habitat is a format conceived to respond to the theme of the re-vitalization of Italian villages, their territory and cultural heritage; which, using and at the same time intertwining with the specific pre-existing context, helps to define and imagine new horizons. A place-based strategy that recognizes the importance of places and the need for careful knowledge built from below, as an essential basis for the activation of oriented interventions which, using the territory as a place of inspiration and action, are able to collect and reworking its precious micro-territorial heritage. The aim of the project is in fact to initiate a dialogue between the cultural, architectural and naturalistic heritage of the place with contemporary research and production, proposing actions and projects that aim at the re-activation of spaces and the promotion of participatory practices in relation to the context.

"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 – August 2021)

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Due to a necessary re-contextualization of Habitat in today's landscape - within a complex, globalized present and therefore stressed by comfort, hyper-connectivity and digital use; we want to rethink the mind-hands dichotomy of Global Tools, adding another element within this system of cultural production. The geographical context of application is therefore added to mind and hands, which in itself contains its specific temporality and sociality. The context in which Global Tools was born is that of the years of lead and the energetic crisis of the early 70s, years in which terror in Italy has been experiences on the streets, fomented by extremist factions both on the right and on the left winds. The students uprisings, with their failure and the consequent return to order within Italian universities, denote in the Global Tools a tendency in researching and experimenting "with extra-institutional spaces of learning". Ultimately arriving "at the creative strategy of producing liminal spaces, breaking away from established and regulated environments associated with the acquisition of knowledge."

A liminal space is a place of transition, a season of waiting, and often not knowing. Considering the period as a particular span of time, we can refer to what cultural anthropologist Victor Turner refer as Liminal Period to contextualise Habitat's proposals within contemporary social-frames: "[...] destructive as well as constructive, meaning that the formative experiences during liminality will prepare the base to occupy a new social role or status. One may see such a communitas as the product of 'antistructure' that emerges when entire societies are going through a crisis or a 'collapse of order.' "So what is the liminal space of Habitat, spanning from a progress-based present and a possible future rooted in proximity resources and local values?

Turner himself, in the essay Betwixt and between: the liminal period in Rites de passage, denotes how the rites of passage "are found in all societies but tend to reach their maximal expression in small-scale, relatively stable and cyclical societies, where change is bound up with biological and metereological rythms and recurrences rather than technological innovations ". Habitat could therefore act as a rite of passage between a voracious contemporaneity and a gentle near future, in harmony with a re-dimensioned and calibrated context to cut out what is not strictly necessary. It is for the same reason that, if on the one hand Global Tools claims the design method in order to create non-useful objects as a critique of voracious consumerism, Habitat draws attention to what is necessary for survival as a field of investigation and storytelling.

With the privilege of being able to study and move from one city to another, I had the opportunity to live different types of cities, spaces of use and aggregation. While considering the different cultural and social natures of all urban agglomerations, there are many constants shared by the places where human beings tend to (densely) inhabit. Among these, the proximity to waterways, which favored the trade and exchange of raw materials, including food. But what now makes the city attractive are the infrastructures and services offered to the citizen, including education - one of the aspects that have the greatest impact on the mobility index. However, education and the dissemination of knowledge have now found multiple ways of application, no longer relegated to academic contexts.

Learning has become a condition of life itself, and for this reason it cannot only concern the formation of individuals with respect to specific social statuses, how much more it must embrace the condition of fragility of our existence, bringing our eyes back to almost primitive dynamics of life and sociality.

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.