La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
The goal is to work on this unfinished renovation project, like a creative construction site that expands throughout the entire village, so as to make some of its spaces progressively functional - for social and cultural purposes - and its re-positioning for a new artistic and cultural expression, within a new urban-rural environmental relationship.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Le Seppie are bringing together two communities. One of students, academics, young professionals and digital nomads, who collectively participate in sharing, celebrating, or directly attempting to re-understand and push the role and efficacy of contemporary architecture and process for citizens of rural territories. The other is the young people of Amantea, whose atmosphere, energy and unique context also suffers from the reduction of public services, depopulation and migration, ageing of the inhabitants and existence of a disused and vacant built heritage. Le Seppie’s activity spans 5 years with the last 2 seeing our activity and practice, although always adapting to the moment and feeding from the small organic life of the context, become more defined. Based in the town of Belmonte Calabro, they seek to extend their values, as defined in their 2020 Glocal Tools and used experimentally through their 2021 activities and partnerships, namely the annual Crossings Workshop, University Field Trips mixed with the waves of visiting participants through the “Belmondo Experience". Now collaborating with a group of young people from Amantea, the town adjacent to our Casa Di Belmondo Hub (CdiB) we have begun to further our engagement with Amantea and its more urban setting. We are currently occupying and wish to develop a generous unused ex-garage space described as as our Lab, towards the neighbourhood. Practically speaking its a place to co-work, store tools, furnitures, socialise and gather, but more so it becomes an aggregation point for us and our young partners to slowly define as a space of potential and familiarity. This seed in the main village of the area that will help connect to the young people of the territory. By working in the more populated setting, Le Seppie will have greater opportunity to engage with the interests and latent possibilities of the young people, and in turn they can begin to “learn by doing” alongside other people from a global world, locally
Key objectives for sustainability
Le Seppie’s vision and now small reality, the “Belmondo” system, aims to give life to a "civic assembly" for stimulating moments of innovation, socially and culturally within a rural marginal area. Constructionally speaking our slow restoration of the CDiB, has carefully and beautifully become about “low cost with big changes”. We are designing and making ourselves with the help of artisans and more skilled actors, bringing knowledge and exchange in the present moment, with the understanding that what we do is also for future inhabitants. Construction is incremental and balances ideas and actions of frugality, ensuring a simple aesthetic and practical comfort.
Our mode of living and working favours local culture, food, resource, frugality of construction and the promotion of shared time and space. Living in Belmonte for two years we have begun to meet with local farmers and inhabitants of the mountain side, with the aim that further collaboration, research, funding, and more so, shared time and exchange could open the way to genuine interventions that can promote local food, and cultural practice. Our written work, research with partnering universities, local presence, dialogue and exchanging moments with local farmers in agricultural areas is a form of research for us largely continued through visiting students. We mix, conversation, conviviality and enquiry of these areas to build towards a plan of working with them. This way knowledge and ideas are shared, but more so introductions are made between actors of shared interests. A re-invention of an architectural commons working with and from local agriculture. Our location within the Market Square of Amantea could play a role in this contamination. Le Seppie should pursue this through a bigger and more diverse network in Amantea. Having written on this theme previously, we seek to work and possibly be accommodated in this network, to ultimately try and promote rural culture and local produce to different audience
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
By continuing to promote integration and development of the territory, we connect old and new inhabitants to reflect on how research, architecture, design, art and communication can be used to improve the shared urban fabric of a rural community. Conversely, conviviality and joy are provided by sharing and enjoying a rural, coastal landscape, away from the city, reconnecting with nature. Belmondo experience, loosely defined as an extended stay in the territory with our community, providing both a cultural experience and individual remote working, has allowed people to experience living and working in a contemporary rural setting with new people. This activity has shared aims to promote and transform these places into cultural attractions, but also to enhance their autonomy and independence in the organic organization of local life. By slowly creating a longer-term plan for working in Amantea, the aim is to describe the villages as a living architectures, a set of places that can welcome the unexpected and offer free spaces in which to integrate unscheduled uses and allow communities to appropriate them according to their own collective needs. The physicality of these spaces already exists, but as vacant or in lesser condition. Before we can seek to find means of intervening in them, we must support and enhance active communities to want to manage them. Formally speaking, aesthetic qualities of the complete restoration of our 1 floor, kitchen, garden space and furnitures come from simplicity of fabrication with wood and metal, through collective DIY constructions run by our partners Orrizontale, an architecture collective from Rome. Combined with our analogue and digital communications, the output is often described as somewhere between domestic, public and animated, which is no doubt a direct reflection on the wider culture we tap into and welcome. We wish to extend these qualities to our setting in Amantea, using a considered aesthetic with a DIY process.
Key objectives for inclusion
Le Seppie by being host, hosted and mediators simultaneously within the town, aims at using two contemporary phenomena - villages’ depopulation and global immigration, as an opportunity, rather than a crisis. By doing so, they move beyond mere cultural exchange, to reach a new degree of contamination of places and ‘non-places’. The main aim is the generation of moments, designed to tackle those phenomena, by providing new ways of encounters that can bring people of different ages and cultures together. Le Seppie wants to generate a melting pot of elements, resources, from different fields: architectural, cinema, theatrical, musical, culinary and sports. The main objectives:
-
Increase the knowledge of the local area and its cultural heritage
-
Test new innovative actions to tackle the depopulation of minor villages
-
Design and build urban structure for the areas and places subject to re-qualification
-
Value cultural differences and promote contamination
-
Promote the local craftsmanship and the typical culinary culture
-
Facilitate conversations and exchange between the different cultural and generational communities
These initiatives aim to deepen the values of equality among citizens through collaboration, integration and social inclusion through research, study, training and exchange. Linking stakeholders is key to the success of such a system. Its work emphasises creating new links between unconnected stakeholders who are already inclined to improve their area but who require a network in order to create stronger opportunities. Yet while the local youth are leaving their home region (Calabria) to bigger cities or other countries seeking better educational and professional opportunities, a new population from various African and Asian countries has landed on the shore, with a desire of integration, of contribution, which cannot be fulfilled due to a shortage of opportunities and innovation in most of the hosting regions.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
The ambition is to combine our experiences with the needs and opportunities of working with a younger population in Amantea. The aim is to create, through the direct experience conducted in Belmonte Calabro, a dynamic and open catalogue in which the design, artistic and craft practices produced can give shape to a new “tools kit” to allow the transfer of self-study opportunities in our different areas of interest. We try to ask “How can local communities be involved in the design, construction and management of their common spaces?” On the one hand, the purpose is to share disciplines, resources, culture and knowledge to improve the quality of life with an eye towards innovation, on the other it is to learn and develop skills that can improve the surrounding context with the goal of increasing the productivity of the group with local active agents, particularly young people.
The GT includes all those tools that define Le Seppie approach and express its value identity. The name communicates the dual presence of the global and the local, part of a generation matured in globalization that wants to act locally, adapting its skills to the context to carry out appropriate actions. We use
Learning – By – Doing, Conviviality, Horizontality, Participation, Transdisciplinary, Experimentation and Re-Use as a basis to inform the process of our creative output through working and living together.
Work we undertake with the young people will be a means of actively learning how to begin to approach making change and what tools and actors can play a role. A previous open-construction workshop that focused on the rehabilitation of a small garden space adjacent to our CDiB, had sparked small imaginations for two of the young people we work with, when they asked, “Could we do something like this in Amantea?” While our initiatives with the town can continue this momentum, physical development of our Lab space could create a reference point about us, for the locals, as we do so.
