The setting for the start of this project, in 2009, was Malta’s shelter, the Marsa Open Centre (MOC ), a former school turned into a refuge for migrants requesting political asylum. The refugees are temporarily put up in the shelter, whose official aim is to favour their integration in the Maltese society. However, at the time of the workshop, the MOC was a ghetto for social outcasts. Through various visits, we started to perceive forces, reasons and tensions revealing a desire for change in the people populating the shelter (both staff and guests). Love Difference has involved the MOC ’s staff and an interdisciplinary group from the outside to bring to the surface a shared dream through a process of active listening. During the workshop tools and practices of observation, listening, analysis and planning were tranferred onto the participants. Technicians and cultural mediators found themselves working together, designing a new environment which met the requirements, the values, the expectations and the dreams the workshop was enabling them to share, obstacles were considered and creatively transformed according to a new regenerating perspective. Starting from that activity, throughout the years, the MOC ’s staff have worked to bring radical changes, like a better space management and the reduction of the number of guests in the centre, aimed at creating a respectful, healthy and welcoming environment. The workshop is part of the project As_Tide, curated by Cittadellarte with the support of the European Commission’s Culture Programme.
The current process of transformation of every aspect of our life towards a higher level of individual and social responsibility, developed by the projects included in this constantly updated map and by many others not yet included, is thus made visible and above all accessible and therefore open to opportunities for connections and collaborations.
Since 2003, when at Cittadellarte we started to systematically catalogue responsible practices in their different declinations around the world, the global movement of social awareness has reached a wider and wider scope of individuals, communities and institutions.
The project Geographies of Change maps this movement into the form of a participative online archive which intends to be a utility contributing to achieving two strategic global objectives: making public, visible and usable the common good represented by the concrete experiences already active in the world, and facilitating connections, both within this geography and among its hubs and any other civil society organization with which to build bridges and collaboration paths.
Created by Cittadellarte and the University of Ideas as a platform for research and action, it aims at being an open project in progress, generated by the users themselves: everybody is invited to position themselves within this geography and to explore it experimenting its potential in the context of their own research and practice.
The ultimate goal of the Geographies of Change is making more obvious, shared, incisive and deep the impact of the practices aiming at changing our societies towards more responsible cohabitation models with ourselves and the planet. Each of us is invited to consider assuming a role which goes beyond being a member of a hypothetical democratic society and activating themselves as agents of change. At Cittadellarte, we have developed an articulated narrative and an hands-on implementation model for this process: we started off by reflecting within the open laboratory of the University of Ideas on the undelivered dream of democracy (rule of the people, from ancient Greek Demos and Cratos) and on the instituting power embedded in daily practices enacted by all kinds of organizations. Each of them constitutes an actual microstate, with its legislative and governing bodies: they perform practices by means of which they actually express power. Thus we coined the term Demopraxy, by which we mean this more effective and actual declination of an old and never accomplished dream, that of Democracy.
Please refer to our websites for further information and contact:
www.cittadellarte.it/en/attivita/demopraxy
www.cittadellarte.it/unidee/
Cittadellarte is a new model of artistic and cultural institution which places art in direct interaction with the different sectors of society, in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation through creative ideas and projects.
Michelangelo Pistoletto's symbol Rebirth is an elaboration of the mathematical sign for infinity. The two opposite circles represent nature and artifice, the central circle is the conjunction of the two and represents the womb of rebirth.
Take part too: www.terzoparadiso.org
