Generazione Bellezza - Beauty Generation
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
"Generazione Bellezza" (Beauty Generation) it's a cultural project designed to create an higher level of awareness about the value of tangible and intangible heritage, nature and personal talents.
The tool the tool to achieve the goal it's a TV program to show concrete actions and inspire emulation and change.
It's the storytelling of a Country and its inhabitants that enhance the beauty built over the centuries beside the one of today.
To give a future to everybody's destinies and dreams.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
GENERAZIONE BELLEZZA it's a project dealing with:
- ECONOMICS OF BEAUTY. It means sustainable, circular, shared economy. Real. How ideas push territories work, create employment, well-being and the chance for young people to stay in the places where they were born. That is DEMOCRACY.
- WORK, EMPLOYMENT, NEW JOBS that allow people to work developing personal attitudes, talents, PASSIONS. To express yourself through you work. To build their HAPPINESS.
- ROADS OF VISIONS and COURAGE to carry on your ideas when everyone tells you that it is impossible, that it cannot be done, that it "does not make sense". Instead, it did have a strong meaning and these stories are made to prove it.
- CREATIVITY that Italians are really steeped in to the core but too often italians are afraid to pull out. While today the whole world can to be inspired.
- COMMUNITIES that come together around a DEVELOPMENT PROJECT as an opportunity for each one to become the driving force of the other. Growing in differences but respecting others and the environment. For ethics or for utility. Better for both.
- TERRITORIES with their immense heritage waiting to be valued as it deserves: landscapes, traditions, knowledge, agriculture, archeology, craftsmanship, architecture, food and wine, art, culture, nature. So much still to be discovered by the point of view of the shared value.
- CONNECTIONS between people, between the different disciplines of our daily actions, between the knowledge and assets we have, between territories and the people who live there, between the countless identities to be composed as a mosaic
- EXAMPLES of normal people and extraordinary stories. People who weren't afraid to start. People who seem to say: what are you waiting for?
- CULTURE as the most extraordinary chance, proven in facts, to create economy, development and well-being. Still "a chance" because it's not yet connected enough with communities and therefore with public choices.
Key objectives for sustainability
The project shows how all the success stories that are broadcasted have a common basis: the sustainability of the entire design chain. In the texts of each story it is always indicated that this is the main way to carry out ANY initiative.
It is, simply, the best way, this is the message that is brought to viewers: that if they want to follow a good example of success they must take this fundamental aspect into consideration. Sustainability in tourism as a source of greater attractiveness, the sustainability of a community as an instrument of efficiency, the agriculture of relationships as less land consumption and many, many other examples. Always with the same philosophy of sustainability plugged at the base of every process.
From a production point of view, still keeping a very very high image quality, the crew has been reduced to the essential elements, optimizing the production chain, minimizing production costs in terms of travel and impacts.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The project is literally based on the "economy of beauty" key.
This means that the whole narrative process runs along tracks in which the aesthetic dimension is the track on which the train of the story travels.
The aesthetic element becomes a substantial element of development. Internal element, not superficial.
The title of the program is: "BEAUTY GENERATION" and it means many things.
- The beauty created by humans and by nature that has generated part of our present well-being
- A generation born in the concept of beauty. In fact, hundreds of generations who have fed on this food for the mind and soul.
- People who, with their choices, with their concrete daily actions, "generate" new beauty. To nourish themselves, their land, their community and next ones. It's a "next generation" based program.
The program is literally soaked with aesthetic and moral beauty - without having to enter into a Kantian judgment -.
The beauty of places, people's work, buildings, art, handicrafts, agricultural products, etc.
In one episode Brunello Cucinelli speaks about his father, a farmer, who plowed the land always being careful to go straight. The reason? Because it was more beautiful.
Here we are. The program shows, with practical examples, that it is really more beautiful to make straight lines, no matter what are you doing, plowing the land or you life. And that it doesn't cost more.
But, above all and thanks also to our choices, it says that with beauty you live, eat and you can be happy because you live in a more beautiful, better, world.
Key objectives for inclusion
The program shows a number of examples of inclusion that can be replicated.
But, above all, it shows how inclusion is a central key to real development.
The first level concerns social inclusion and is shown with the example of a community that arranges itself to build its future in a little town in the south of Sicily.
In the episode entitled "Sciacca, the dream of a community" it is told how the process to stop demographic exodus together with economic, cultural and social poverty, is based on public participation, citizen engagement, co-design of the processes.
An economy that is reborn on cultural tourism by enhancing the identities of the individual inhabitants who, once connected, become a hospitable community.
The second level concerns accessibility and inclusion of diversity. In the same episode is presented the story of Stefano Turturici, a blind man who offers a very special experience by the sea for tourists who arrive in his town.
Tourists are completely blindfolded, temporarily depriving them of the use of sight. Then they are taken aboard, on a small boat that goes out to sea. There Stefano teaches how to orient yourself using your other senses: the touch to feel the sun on your face and therefore understand its position, the smell to feel the direction of the wind, the hearing to catch the sound of the port and identify its position. At that point, having understood exactly where you are, you can start "sailing".
Stefano is clearly not only offering an experience linked to his environment, the sea. Stefano is demonstrating that a fragility, like the loss of sight he suffers, can be the opportunity to offer tourists a different path. What is normally considered a limitation is transformed into an advantage.
All this is made to explain to the spectators that, whatever the form of fragility they suffer from, they can transform it into a "specialty" that contributes to the wealth of the community. And can be replied everywhere.
Results in relation to category
The program has been seen by millions of people, but this is not the primary result, even if it has a certain relevance with respect to the perspective we are discussing in these pages.
The program is today a teaching tool in universities, it is the subject of debates, it is a starting point for the world of culture but also for those worlds that usually look at "culture" with suspicion. Because the project spoke to their hearts and minds.
And finally, because some of the examples shown, have already inspired people to start making their own.
And this was exactly the main purpose for which the project was conceived.
How Citizens benefit
Citizens were involved in the story of themselves. It is a very particular form of involvement that is only apparently passive. Because the story is participation. It means being part of a sharing project. The line is subtle but fundamental.
"Generazione Bellezza" is a collective project with several voices.
And participation in the program has already returned a tangible result because all those who have been shown had a very high increase in contacts and connections. These are not just people who have booked a visit or a stay but people who have offered to collaborate in the projects itself, reinforcing the path of social inclusion of the community on which the narrative of the program is based.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
The project is highly innovative from the point of view of the narrative structure, when compared with other similar tv programs.
Perhaps because, from the real beginning, it was conceived to be a cultural project rather than essentially a television project.
The aim of the project is to stimulate people to understand the value of beauty, of the heritage they are surrounded by, to transform it into concrete value, into a sustainable source of economy for themselves and for others.
By showing the beauty of what others have done. And the beauty of their present live. Usually the result of a big change, a big turn in their life. It is a project that speaks to everyone through the voice of someone and seems to say: "yes, it can be done".
Or "yes, you can do it"
Learning transferred to other parties
The project can be replicated anywhere within the individual nation states, showing the best experiences within a well known cultural perimeter, of a defined cultural comfort zone. This is step one.
But it can be a really powerful tool of cultural cross-media, showing that people and communities with, paths, values, contents very different from each others, can make choices that are so right that they can also be declined in their own living space.
A "Beauty Generation" without borders.
And this cultural connection could and should be one of the next steps in EU's growth
