Milano Mediterranea
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
Milano Mediterranea is the a participatory art model that speaks the languages of South Europe Mediterranean in Milano, involving the citizens of a popular multicultural neighborhood of Milano called Giambellino in the artistic production and artistic programming.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
Milano Mediterranea is a participatory art centre that speaks the languages of South Europe Mediterranean in Milano, involving the citizens of a popular multicultural neighborhood of Milano called Giambellino in the artistic production and artistic programming. Through an open call, the artistic direction choose 3 artists from the South Europe Mediterranean basin resident in Milan, 2 of which will be chosen together with a neighborhood committee, who will be asked to propose 2 months of artistic production that will actively involving citizens of the neighborhood. The project will be focused on different artistic disciplines and can be realized using the artists' mother tongues. A further training moment will be dedicated to the technical skills (lighting and sound engineering) to form a technical team of the neighborhood. Each residency will end with a public presentation, part of a program in the public spaces of the neighborhood. Finally, the neighborhood committee and the artistic direction will co-design a festival, which will see the display of the works produced together with the citizens, in dialogue with artists/s and intellectuals from the EuroMediterranean basin present in the city and the groups/products proposed by the inhabitants. In this sense, MM will be a point of aggregation and mixture for all citizens, with particular reference to young and very young people, that reproduces spaces of sociality, cohesion and community around cultural production and programming.
Key objectives for sustainability
The works realized during the residencies, together with the production of the permanent workshop, will make up a program that will see the final return (concert, performance, installation) in widespread spaces in the neighbourhood.A system of private sponsorships, European and local cultural planning and crowdfunding will be the tools to make available to the citizens an accessible and, at the same time, high quality cultural offer. Through the construction of a digital (social media) and local/physical (Guerrilla Marketing/Volantinaggio) communication strategy, but also through the project network of local partners involving the main youth centres (CD Giambellino, CDE Creta), the schools and the two parishes of reference, and the Mercato Lorenteggio, we intend to reach the young people of the neighbourhood, offering them professional training conducted by professionals from the art world (technicians and producers) who also speak their native languages.
The workshops thus become an opportunity for playful learning of the languages of origin (e.g. Arabic), but also for meeting and exchanging with peers and for professionalisation (lighting, sound, video making, acting), characterised by affordability and linguistic accessibility.
The trainings will be fee-paying with participation fees covered by the MM project for families who cannot afford to pay the registration fee: the cost of the workshops is sliding scale, i.e. if you cannot pay the full fee you can pay according to your possibilities.
The possibility of bringing together different local and city communities, generational and of different origins seems to us a great opportunity for the urban regeneration of the neighbourhood and of the city's image of Giambellino as a new centre of contemporary cultural production.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The development of an innovative artistic production model based on the creation of new audiences, that will be not merely spectators but actively involved in the artistic production: through the direct involvement of adolescents in residencies and, therefore, of their families and circuits of reference in public openings and events promoted by MM, we will open a cultural debate on EuroMediterranean identity, in a neighborhood marked by intercultural difficulties and social stigma.
The first expected change concerns the community of first and second generation of adolescents with migrant backgrounds: through the launch of accessible training activities, for economy and language, with a high professionalizing content, we intend to offer job opportunities and personal revitalization for groups of the population of the neighborhood marked by lack of opportunities. Through paths to enhance personal skills, in fact, we want to build new possible scenarios of identity reconfiguration. In this sense, performative art has a transformative power as a pedagogical and political practice, which passes from physical and collective experience, and is based on awareness and creativity and invention as instruments of personal and collective empowerment.
The creation of the neighborhood committee to support the artistic direction would also like to be another opportunity to create a mixed neighborhood group for age, origin, experience and taste, in order to activate debate, exchange and affection for the space and its contents around the cultural programming.
The third expected change concerns the community of artists from the EuroMediterranean basin present in Milan: MM would like to be able to map and get in touch with an often submerged community, which has little space to speak in the public scene, and make it the protagonist of new ways of cultural production, promoting new narratives about Europe identity and promoting the notion of diversity as a value.
Key objectives for inclusion
Milano Mediterranea starts from the idea that the city of Milan is now part of the Mediterranean arc, thanks to recent migrations that have transformed it into a place of encounter and exchange between cultures.The project intends to contribute to changing the narrative on migration, which still sees "migrants" only as an object of discourse, and aims to make a shift from "object" to "subject", where communities of new citizens become protagonists of cultural production.
The general objective of the project is twofold:
- On the one hand, the aggregation and inclusion of underrepresented and minority groups of citizenship, with particular reference to adolescents and first and second generation youth, who will be the future of the peripheral territories of the cities.
- On the other hand, the creation of new professional skills to respond to the lack of job opportunities through high quality training.
The specific objective is to implement an innovative cultural model, which is a driver of urban regeneration thanks to a cultural proposal where production and programming are designed for and together with citizens, based on the principles of libertarian and informal education.
A community art centre that therefore combines active participation with the quality of research: the final specific objective is in fact to combine active participation with a high aesthetic and formal outcome of the artistic proposal, which can be aggregating with respect to the territory but also with the desire to create works that really speak to the urban public and the neighbourhood.
We believe that MILANO MEDITERRANEA can be a point of aggregation and mixing for all citizens, with particular reference to the young and very young, reproducing spaces of sociality, cohesion and community around the production and cultural programming.
The long-term objective of MILANO MEDITERRANEA is the creation of a participatory widespread cultural centre.
Results in relation to category
During these first 12 months of activity, the MILANO MEDITERRANEA association has built its visual identity by creating a dedicated graphic design, a website (www.milanomediterranea.art) and a communication strategy that makes use of different tools, both digital (social such asFB and IG) and physical, such as the campaign HELLO NEIGHBOURS! campaign, where we delivered letters of good neighbourliness to the various local realities with which we would like to establish collaborative relations (Il Colorificio, CDE Creta, CD Giambellino, CD Irda, Dynamoscopio, spazio WeWord, MiLo lab, Barber Shop Tirana, Café Banlieu, Caffè Giambella Style), which were then communicated on IG or the poster campaign "Vieni che parliamo". We made a promotional video involving local artists (StoryBe and rapper Diamante) for the creation of the original TRAP song "Vieni che parliamo" and its video clip, made with the Neighbourhood Committee.
In July 2020 we launched an open call for artists from the Mediterranean basin living in Milan for projects to be developed in residence in various spaces in the neighbourhood. We had a good participation - 41 projects - and selected the 3 winners with an artist-in-residence in different spaces of the neighbourhood who will be the protagonist of the MiMed Fest programme to be held in June 21 in the public space of Giambellino. We launched and opened registrations for two workshops that took place in mixed mode (online and in presence) from January 21: TRAP COMMUNITY OPERA, a 4-month workshop for migrant teenagers from the neighbourhood aimed at creating a community trap opera set to music, acted out and performed in the spaces of the neighbourhood; and a professional ILLUMINOTECNICA E FONICA workshop for young adults (17 - 30 years old), who follow MiMed activities during the year as a technical team. In June 21 MM with the Committee will co-design and organize a festival in the public space of Giambellino.
How Citizens benefit
The project offers a diversified training program aimed primarily at adolescents from the Giambellino neighbourhood and developed around the different professions of the theatre and the art world. Milano Mediterranea set up a permanent artistic workshop lasting four months plus a specific workshop on the technical skills of the stage (lighting and sound engineering) which opened the training season.
The permanent artistic workshop will be led by the artistic direction of Milano Mediterranea.
will be dedicated to the creation of a participatory art project that will actively involve the citizens of the Giambellino neighbourhood (Milan), with particular reference to young people with migrant background.
Alongside the training, 3 other artists from the Mediterranean diasporas living in Milan, selected through an open call, brought their own project through a two-month participatory art residency. A Neighbourhood Committee, made up of 18 citizens of Giambellino, together with the artistic direction of MM, selected the artists, who are invited to conduct intensive master classes for professionals in order to widen the pool of audiences touched by MM's propulsive strategy.
Each residency will have a final outcome, a public presentation, which will be presented in the public spaces of the neighbourhood. The residencies emphasises the use of mother tongues, including Arabic, in conducting the training and producing the final outcomes.
In this way, a season will be composed throughout the year involving different types of users:
1. Adolescents participating in the permanent workshop and the lighting and sound workshop
2. Young students potentially interested in the masterclasses for both language learning and artistic work.
3.The artists involved 4. Citizens of the neighbourhood involved in cultural co-design 5. The neighbourhood and city audience attracted by the cultural events.
Innovative character
We think that MM will be a useful tool to maintain cultural life and social experiences with a European outreach in times of home lockdown and prepare the ground for a cultural revival of Europe after the crisis. The launch of an innovative cultural project, which focuses on the active participation of citizens, with particular attention to the Euro Mediterranean dimension, is useful for the development of new forms of sociality and cultural production, with a European and international dimension. The project will also produce new forms of cultural production, addressed to a very composed audience, with a local and international dimension. The lack of participation in social and cultural manifestation in the lockdown period will push the necessity of a cultural production that involve actively the citizens. MM proposes itself as a transformative tool that uses performative artistic practices - linked to music, visual, performance - to activate processes of interconnection between people and new contemporary aesthetics. In this difficult period of social distancing, characterized by the emergence of renewed forms of racism, we believe that MM can be useful tool to think about diversity and to put in value the European dimension of our cities, focusing on the active participation and the production of new narratives about identity and social communities.
