A story from "Bridging Culture Through Arts" - centre of the scene

Image Theatre is one of the techniques adopted during the labs of Bridging Culture Through Arts pilot. It’s about a performance exercise in which people do not use words or signs, but use their bodies and objects to communicate an idea and emotion. In this technique one person acts as a sculptor and moulds other people as they were statues to describe a situation.

That day, participants were asked to carry an object with them and explain why they were attached to it. The image theatre was used to see if, and how, a physical object could change in meaning across different cultures and people.

F.a young woman from Bangladesh, brought a ring which she had received as a present from a dearest friend of her and explained to the group that the ring always reminded her of this extremely important person of her life. The ring was chosen by the group as the central element of the Image theatre performance, which was and composed of a three-scene narrative.

F.’s ring was placed in the centre of the room and M. (a Pakistani guy) started his mise-en-scène: in the first one, he put a girl sit in the middle of the room with a thick veil covering her face and making her not visible; in the second one, M. jumped himself into the scene putting the ring on the girl’s finger; and only in the third scene, M. could take away the veil and see the girl’s face. The two people could finally look at each other.

This representation told a lot about some of the Middle Eastern cultures and traditions. M. put himself into the scene manifesting his roots.

Moreover, the ring, that represented for F. a symbol of friendship between two women, was turned into a symbol of wedding by M. This is a fundamental characteristic of this kind of activity that lays the ground for a serene coexistence of several meanings without conflict.

A story from Bridging Culture Through Arts

When the participants had the opportunity to re-stage the scenes, D., an Italian girl, re-proposed the same situation of the first scene of M. But in the second scene the ring was put on the woman’s finger and her veil lifted, and D. worked on the expressions of the two sculptures giving them a mix of surprise and scare. In the last scene, the woman ran away and the man chased her.

At the completion of the last scene, the audience and the protagonists of the story burst into a thunderous laughter, transforming an extremely delicate moment into a sort of comedy about the wedding, in which different cultures could meet and, through the game, dialogue without feeling criticized or attacked. It was really impressive to realize that strong and rigid cultural traditions, as imposed weddings are, could be questioned and peacefully discussed through irony. 

Yaya is a young guy coming from Burkina Faso. He is full of life, curious and smart, very conscious of the reasons that are determining the migration flows from Africa to Europe. We met him for the first time during an Italian language course, organised by ORISS. He did not waste time and immediately wanted to remark that a lot of African people are forced to leave their countries, where they are living as slaves of multinational corporations that farm cacao or coffee plants for foreign trades.

Yaya continued pointing out that countries, like Burkina Faso, do not benefit of their richness that is in the hands of a little number of landowners.

Yaya has lived in Pisa from about 3 years. He does not like talking about his trip to reach Italy, where he is determined to reconstruct his life with a new job and a new social network. Thanks to his pretty high-level Italian, during the visits to the museums, Yaya likes delighting us with memories of his experience and tell his stories.

We were visiting the Natural History Museum with the group of ORISS, during one of the visits organised in collaboration with the Pisa University Museums System. We were all impressed by the exemplars of animals shown along the museum’s rooms. The Natural History museum is hosted into the awesome venue of the monumental Charterhouse of Calci (Pisa – Italy) and tells the present and ancient history of animals from all over the world.

A story from "so distant incredibly close" - collection

Yaya was really fascinated by the reptiles’ room. Our guide was explaining the origin and the histories of crocodiles samples exhibited into the showcases when Yaya took the word for telling us the story of the Crocodiles Sacrés of the Burkina Faso.

In Burkina – Yaya said – there is the village of Sacred Crocodiles, where crocodiles are not dangerous, and where you can even swim with them! But, pay attention: do not confuse sacred crocodiles with not sacred ones… in that case swimming with them would be very dangerous” – Yaya said laughing.

The mentioned village is Bazoulé, a small town near the Burkina Faso’s capital. A local legend narrates that, during a terrible drought, about the XIV or XV centuries, a group of crocodiles drove some women towards a water spring, where exactly Bazoulé has arisen.

Since that time, women and men have peacefully been cohabiting with these animals: swimming and playing with them. They feed these animals that are considered as real protectors of the village.

People – continued Yaya – offer food to these sacred animals and use them as a divinatory instrument”.

The visit to the Natural History museum was fruitful under several point of view and Yaya allowed us to discover a fascinating story about his original country, a story that we will transform soon in illustration.

Manchester pilot - more in common

What has been the impact of Brexit on immigrant communities in the UK? A work with local migrant and non-migrant communities to explore how we have “more in common”.

The project is creating opportunities for different communities in Greater Manchester to meet, discuss, and explore what they have “in common”.

Who is involved in the activities?

PHM targeted a diverse group of participants that included residents across different migration experiences such as refugees, asylum seekers, second generation migrant communities, naturalised citizens, migrant workers, migrant students, and ‘native’ citizens.

More in Common is an opportunity to work together with the stimulus of Jo Cox – the politician and passionate advocate for multiculturalism murdered by a far-right terrorist, that stated in her maiden speech to Parliament that “we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us” – to think about what it means to live in a multicultural Britain today and how Brexit has changed that dynamic and feeling in the country.

The case study is partly envisioned as a celebration of different people’s voices and points of view and partly as a reflection of social and political changes happening. Therefore, it represents an opportunity for participants to have a voice in the creation of cultural heritage and artistic outputs within the museum space to champion diversity and to engage a broader audience within the debate of how much multiculturalism is valued in Britain.

PHM’s existing relationships and collaboration with NGOs and community groups was necessary to help us spread the announcement to recruit participants from a diverse background, among these the Jo Cox Foundation (https://www.jocoxfoundation.org/).

The current group of participants is a mix of age groups and genders, although participants identifying as women are much more than those identifying as men. The ethnicities of participants are also very diverse both within the British people (many come from mixed heritage or minor ethnicity groups in the UK) and non-British participants that include Hong Kong, Poland, Syria, India, DRC, Sierra Leone, France, Iran.

Some of them are asylum seekers or refugees while others have different migration reasons and stories.

Many participants told us after meeting the group that this is probably the most diverse room they have ever been into, but most of them consider themselves to be Mancunians. In the word of one of the participants:

“I am keen to get involved in projects that promote Manchester friendliness and dialogue between different nationalities who made the city their home.”

Manchester has a long heritage of activism and PHM – as well as Jo Cox’s memorial wall – represent the ideas that worth fighting for.

What do the activities consist of?

Following a launch event at the People’s History Museum, people had the opportunity to sign up as project participants. The key messages we used to explain what the project looks like were:

Do you believe that we can live together in a multicultural society without labels?  Are you looking for a space to meet a diverse range of people?

Be part of a group getting together at People’s History Museum every fortnight to meet, discuss, and explore what you have in common.  You can choose what you want to do and how you will spend the time together.

Working with an amazing facilitator, Magdalen Bartlett, the first 4 fortnightly gatherings are intended to build the group and get to know each other’s interests and skills.

We had clear objectives for those gatherings, however, we kept the plans flexible as we needed to adapt to what we managed to achieve in each session and build on it. The objectives included: getting to know each other; setting ground rules; exploring motivations of participants to get involved; brainstorming suggestions/ ideas for the fortnightly gatherings to be used for voting and making final decisions; introducing the next level of engagement through the smaller groups gatherings, we decided to call them Mini More in Common; and finally, making decisions on how to proceed, both in terms of fortnightly gatherings and the mini groups.

The Mini More in Common was an opportunity for participants to establish smaller groups of who shares a similar interest. Once founded, the mini group will decide their own schedule and frequency of meetings. We managed to start forming these groups before suspending the meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A glimpse into the future

The journey and experience of the participants will be celebrated and shared with the world in an exhibition in memory of Jo Cox. The exhibition will feature Jo Cox memorial wall with a new virtual memorial wall projected in the exhibition space.

The participants will work alongside museum staff to produce content reflecting their journey together whether through photos, text, personal account, etc.

However, participants will mainly focus on producing their own creative outcome that they’d have developed as part of their mini projects. The type of outcomes is varied: a photo / text collage, oral histories, fabric-based installations, theatre plays. All content will be digitised and a digital exhibition will be launched as a legacy for the project. Finally, as part of the national campaign by Jo Cox Foundation to celebrate Jo’s life, we are hosting a Great Get Together event organised by the project participants.

 

Discover further details of the pilot on CultureLabs platformhttps://recipes.culture-labs.eu/#/workspace/recipes/644

Helsinki pilot activity - zoom in on heritage

Cultural heritage is alive, and it changes when people from different cultures meet. Zoom In On Heritage pilot invites participants to use photographs to show and document how they experience living cultural heritage.

Who is involved in the activities?

Museovirasto – Finnish Heritage Agency is currently organising the pilot in Finland, putting the material of Picture Collections unit at disposal of the participants to reflect on differences and similarities between Finnish culture and the one from their country of origin.

Picture Collections is part of Finland’s national cultural heritage, they include 18 million pictures, dating from the 1500s to the present, representing the cultural, historical, ethnological, environmental, architectural and journalistic heritage of Finland. The material is available for public use. The collections also include the Press Photo Archive (JOKA): news and entertainment images from newspapers over the past decades.

The pilot activities are involving two target groups: women with migration background (to investigate the process from a gender perspective) and the Russian-speaking minority in Finland. Two collaborators were crucial to address and reach the communities as well as to plan the activities:

  • Nicehearts (https://www.nicehearts.com/), a women’s organisation based in Vantaa (a municipality next to Helsinki) established in 2001 with the aim to produce community-based activities for girls and women of different ages and backgrounds in order to enable girls and women to find their own place in society as its equal and unique members.
  • Cultura Foundation (https://culturas.fi/en/that enhances the participation of the Russian speaking community to take part in cultural activities with the aim of facilitating them to become an active part of the Finnish society while maintaining their own language and identity. 

What do the activities consist of?

Preliminary activities, such as informal meetings and training, were fundamental to stimulate participation.

The pilot invited the participants to express and discuss their views, ideas and identity through pictures to find new ways of using the existing material of the Picture Collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency – Museovirasto, and to explore new perspectives and stories for which the collections could give inspiration to or provide input for.

The two target groups, with their own characteristics, followed different steps with the support of Nicehearts for the women’s group and Cultura Foundation for the Russian-speaking minority.

THE WOMEN’S GROUP

The idea of working with the women’s group is to provide opportunity for the participants to reflect on their identity, self-image, ideas and things that are important to them through visual and photographic means from any perspective that is meaningful to them.

At the same time we are exploring how of the archival picture material of the Picture Collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency can be used by ordinary people in a meaningful and creative way and especially by groups who would not otherwise find that kind of resource.

The process was based on “sensing the context” format, an open listening to the perspectives and ideas of the participants which included different steps:  

  1.     Informal meetings and workshops by using pictures (collections and participants own) as icebreaking activity to introduce the project, hear their ideas and to get to know each other.

In these workshops creative exercises engaged participants in selecting pictures and telling stories through them, indeed pictures can evoke different sensations and ideas in different people, and thus examined the concept of interpretation in the grassroot level.

The objective was to hear what interests them so as to identify the common themes and the best way to approach photographs. It was interesting to experiment the pictures both in printed versions and digitally by using a project, the first version seemed to have many advantages with this group.

  1.     Visits to the Picture Collections and Worker’s Housing Museum.

Two visits to the Picture Collections archives were organised to introduce participants into the collections and what the project is doing.

The first visit was planned as an interactive tour “The path of the picture”, which showed and explained the different steps of the process to ingest the picture into the archives: conservation and preservation, digitisations and publishing/utilisation.

Another important part of the visits was the selection of pictures on the theme “how people lived before” that had emerged in the previous workshops. After this, visiting the Worker’s Housing Museum has provided a more concrete idea of the theme explored through the pictures.

  1.     Creative workshops and participatory: create an own album of pictures to form a story

A group of 11 women participated at two specific workshops where they shaped the ideas that had emerged in the previous phases and created personal albums (either their own or from the collections) to tell their own stories. 

THE RUSSIAN-SPEAKING GROUPS

The objectives and the formats were similar, but in this case it was necessary to prepare facilitators who helped to overcome language barriers, in strictly collaboration with Cultura Foundation.

  1. Visit to the Picture Collections with the facilitators

A visit to the archives of the Picture Collections was organised for the facilitators to get an idea of how the collections work, and some glimpses of the material. We also organised an introduction to the systems of the collections management systems so that they could use them to find material of interest.

  1. Training for 11 Russian-speaking facilitator
  1. Co-creation workshops and planning meetings with the Russian-speaking facilitators

Three themes have been identified to better encourage participation of the Russian-speaking minority:

  • The Project 1: Diverse Identity is ideated for young targets to explore and reflect different sides of one’s own identity through pictures, in a mix of digital picture from the Picture Collections and own photos.
  • The Project 2: Winter aims at reflecting on a theme that connects people who live in the Northern areas, especially comparing the winter before and now due to the change of habits and climate change.
  • The Project 3: Food aims at coming together and creating intercultural understanding through food, collecting people’s stories about food.

A glimpse into the future

With the exception of the Project 2: Winter with the Russian-speaking target groups, that has already been published into the website www.plusmiinustalvi.com, the result of the pilot activities are currently being re-assessed due to COVID-19 emergency.

The general idea is to produce as digital an online project the envisaged outputs, stay tuned for updates!

 

Discover further details of the pilot on CultureLabs platformhttps://recipes.culture-labs.eu/#/workspace/recipes/652 (women group) and https://recipes.culture-labs.eu/#/workspace/recipes/654 (Russian speaking community).

Ancona pilot activity - Bridging Culture Through Arts

A multiethnic district, as many of our cities, where different and diverse cultures are co-living: how public entities and civil society organizations can support mutual understanding and social cohesion? How culture can bridge the gap?

Bridging Culture Through Arts brings together citizens (both migrants and autochthones) living in a neglected urban area characterized by high multi-ethnic variety. The idea is to create a cohesive group through art-based activities to help overcoming the difficulties in getting socially involved.

Who is involved in the activities?

COOSS manages services for migrants, among them asylum seekers and refugees under protection programs, and wants to develop the pilot in a multiethnic district of Jesi (Marche Region), involving people with different ethnicities. Presently, participants of the pilot come from Pakistan, Perù, Argentina, Ukraine, Brasil, Mali, Guinea, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Kosovo, China, USA, Romania, Germany, Cuba, Nigeria, Albania, Russia, Poland, Siria, Venezuela.

The close collaboration with public administrations, schools and integration centres, which are in contact with associations, was crucial to create the groups of work. In particular, it is worth mentioning the strong collaboration with: 

  • the Municipality of Jesi, which supported the pilot since the beginning, making available spaces where performing the pilot activities, ensuring an institutional framework for the project and facilitating the collaboration with the Municipal Library. The library was founded in 1859, and was named Planettiana in tribute to the Pianetti family, who donated its precious books collection to the Municipality. The archive contains a book heritage of over 150,000 volumes on local, regional and European history. The Library has a public reading section, with more than 50,000 volumes including periodicals and newspapers, a local section, a photo library and a special children’s section.
  • the Associazione Teatro Giovani Teatro Pirata (ATGTP),  a non-profit association whose long course professionals propose education theatre, social theatre, public training and theatre production for the young generations, with the purpose to exploit the potential of theatre techniques in the educational and social contexts.
  • the CPIA (Provincial Centre for Adult Education), which provides several didactic courses, among which Italian language courses for foreign adults, to help them to obtain officially recognized qualifications. The teacher of Italian language at the centre collaborates with the project, motivating her students to participate to our pilot and attending the coordination meetings herself. 

The activities are lead by a social pedagogist working in COOSS and specialized in groups dynamics and conflicts management. He proposes different techniques and activities in the course of the meetings with the working group, aimed at fostering interactions, enhancing dialogue, handling crises when emerging and understanding expectations and wishes. He reports activities and observations to the  coordination group, assuring the respect of the participants’ privacy. 

What do the activities consist of?

COOSS involves people in the co-creation of art-based activities, allowing participants to spontaneously share their cultural heritage and to properly approach the hosting country’s one.

The activities are a combination of different methods such as theatre labs, role playing activities, sharing of their own cultural heritage through the exchange of pictures and objects, cooking traditions or storytelling. The involvement of the participants is the result of a process to encourage emphatic adhesion to the activities: firstly, informal contacts, visits and meetings were carried out with the relevant parties to identify potential participants to create the pilot group; then, an initial public event made the project known and explained the reasons of the proposed activities.

After that, the concrete phase of workshops started with playful activities in a relaxed atmosphere and friendly relationships to create a cohesive group: theatre labs, role playing and other methods has been used to experiment the possibilities which can emerge from conflicting situations and how communication can help to solve diverging perspectives.

A glimpse into the future

Once participants have gained self-confidence and increased their language proficiency and communication capabilities, meetings will turn into co-creation opportunities, where the group will identify art-based activities and produce an output able to represent their experience.

The original idea was to create a final visual product to be presented to the whole citizenship in the form of a projection on a neighborhood building, then to be turned into a murales. A public event was planned to present the output, but the outbreak of Covid-19 emergency has impacted our programs forcing us to be ready to rethink the project activities.

 

Discover further details of the pilot on CultureLabs platformhttps://recipes.culture-labs.eu/#/workspace/recipes/640

Pisa pilot activity - so distant incredibly close

Customs, practices, beliefs, traditions, lifestyles, values, memories, stories constitute an important part of the cultural heritage as well as instruments of a self-representation.

For this reason, So distant, Incredibly Close pilot solicits the migrants involved to reflect on their idea of cultural heritage. What does cultural heritage mean for them? And again, which piece of cultural heritage would they take along with them for representing their roots, for not forgetting their cultural identity and not feeling alone?

Who is involved in the activities?

Fondazione Sistema Toscana is currently working with two groups of migrants: a group of about 15 women coming from different countries, such as Brasil, Poland, Iraq, Iran, and a small group of young people coming from Africa (specifically Nigeria, Ghana and Burkina Faso). Creating groups from scratch would have been difficult, so we relied on the professional experience of associations already working with migrants, investigating their interest to collaborate with us for the project purposes, and inserting So distant, Incredibly Close pilot in their already existing cultural offers and social services.

Casa della Donna (https://www.casadelladonnapisa.it/) is a historic feminist association, founded in 1990, that sustains women’s rights against any kind of violence. Among its activities, Casa della Donna is now providing migrant women with free Italian language courses, and our project So distant, Incredibly Close has been integrated into the linguistic offer of the Casa della Donna association, thus increasing their occasions to speak Italian with natives, to put into practice the learned lesson and measure their linguistic competence in different contexts.

ORISS Onlus (http://www.oriss.org/) is a non-profit association consisting of an interdisciplinary group of experts coming from different fields and promoting processes of mutual knowledge and kicks off processes of wellness, with the objective to contribute to the development and health of the human community. We are now working with a small group of migrants, that previously took part of ORISS activities, to experiment museum visits as a form of self-confidence (o empowerment) and social inclusion.

What do the activities consist of?

Museums’ contents become a stimulus to trigger memories and stories of/from migrants visiting museums’ collections. Historical, artistic, naturalistic and scientific heritage, conserved in 4 museums of the Pisa University Museum System, take part in this game of memory:

Museum of calculation and computation instruments, whose rich collections offer a fascinating journey through the history of the European computation methodology, and more generally through the history of European cultural system, that has given rise to the contemporary western technological system.

Gipsoteca of Ancient Art that houses faithful copies of some of the most famous and significant works of Greek, Etruscan and Roman art, today preserved in different national and foreign museums or unfortunately lost in some cases.

Museum of Natural History that collects and exhibits more than 400 years of history in the scientific and natural science research of the Pisa University. Its permanent exhibitions include mineralogical, paleontological and zoological exemplars, organized according to thematic criteria and displayed on over 4,000 m² of halls and galleries, arranged on 3 floors.

Botanical Museum and Garden that hosts plants from the 5 continents and of a wide variety: wild plants for food use, officinal plants, a rich collection of different types of camellias and hydrangeas, bamboo forest, wild orchids and ancient trees.

The collections of those museums attest the outcomes of the researches and studies conducted by the University academics, witnessing important stages of the evolution of the scientific thought and of the European culture. The University Museum System has the main purpose of enhancing and preserving the scientific and cultural academic heritage.

The objects exhibited in the Pisa museums represent an entry door to bring the remembrance back to a custom, practice, belief, tradition, lifestyle (etc.) of the migrants’ cultural background and lay the ground for creativity.

Each museum, depending on the typology and characteristics of its collections, is providing people with different opportunities to share ideas and interests, in order to contribute to the collective cultural enrichment.

A glimpse into the future

So distant, Incredibly Close is basically composed of 3 main pivots:

  •     Guided visits at the museums’ collections with the tutoring of the Pisa University scholars.
  •     Emerging of stories and memories with the collaboration of cultural mediators.
  •     Transformation of the stories and memories collected in sketches and illustrations with the collaboration of artists.

Indeed, migrants will be able to enrich the museums with their knowledge and cultural contribution, thus demonstrating that museums can constitute a platform for kicking an intercultural understanding. The stories and memories collected as illustrations will be exhibited during an exhibition that will give us the opportunity to organise a final event, involving the general audience too.

The illustrations might be collected in an online exhibition at the end of the pilot activities.

 

Discover further details of the pilot on CultureLabs platform: https://recipes.culture-labs.eu/#/workspace/recipes/647

The Culturelabs platform, which is being developed to help users organise participatory projects tailored to their needs as the ultimate goal, is online!

Our internal team have been testing the first version of the system, which only include basic functionalities, by creating profiles and uploading relevant content. Now Sheffield Hallam University is seeking to gather some further external feedback about the platform, in order to improve and further develop it.

This evaluation of the CultureLabs platform will be carried out through two distinct evaluative rounds – to be delivered respectively in March and December 2020 – with a consideration for the evolution of the design and development process.

Do you work in Cultural Heritage? Are you working for a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)? Do you work with migrants / refugees / disadvantaged groups? Are you generally interested in participatory projects? If so, we need your feedback!

 

Test the plaform at the following link: https://recipes.culture-labs.eu/

 

We have developed an online survey which will guide you whilst accessing the platform. The survey asks a number of questions about the basic functionality of the CultureLabs platform to gather your feedback about its usability.

If you think you could help the CultureLabs team to evaluate our platform, please fill in the following survey: https://en.surveys.crowdvocacy.org/::Bg6szJHP

For any further information or clarification, please contact us or our postdoctoral reasercher Danilo Giglitto (d.giglitto@shu.ac.uk), we’ll be happy to discuss this further with you.

In 2020, 70 million of people worldwide are still forced to leave their original country because of conflicts, violence and persecutions. Of these, around 26 million have found refuge in a safe country, thus becoming “refugees”[1]. The Geneva Convention (1951) establishes safeguards in favour of refugees, trying to guarantee housing rights, public support and education to these people. But what the Law protects, the Reality sometimes overturns.

Particularly, international protection holders encounter difficulties in accessing education, especially higher and university education. Thus the Manifesto of Inclusive University of the UN Refugee Agency was born, with the aim of supporting refugees’ admission to the university education and research, promoting social integration and active participation in the academic life. Universities and research centres signing the Manifesto commit themselves to take concrete measures for the inclusion.

This Manifesto lists several measures to be taken to guide and protect students in different phases of their university career: such as application phase, recognition of qualifications obtained abroad, tutoring during courses and/or internships’ activities, scholarships and other incentives oriented to support the study and urban mobility, humanitarian corridors for selection and enrolment of refugee students that are resident in a third country.

The University of Pisa has always been aware that cultural, practical and intellectual experiences of refugee students and scholars can be a big resource for Italy, contributing to the society’s development. Thus, the University of Pisa has subscribed the Manifesto, with the aim to foster refugee students and scholars’ participation to the academic life and projects. This step is fully in line with other initiatives taken in the past and currently active (such as the drafting of dedicated provision for facilitating enrolment of refugees and asylum seekers residing in Italy, the Observatory on European Migration Law, the specialization courses organised by the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi per la Pace-CISP, the institution of a curriculum on migration in the Master Programme in International Studies-LM52, the Centro di ricerca sulle Nuove Migrazioni e Mobilità Qualificate–UbiQual), as well with the recent launch of the Network of the Universities for Peace.

CultureLabs and the University of Pisa

In addition to that, it is worth underlining that the University of Pisa is active with innovative projects on several fronts of the cultural and social inclusion. Currently the Museum University System (SMA) of Pisa opens its museums’ doors to people who participate in the pilot “So Distant, Incredibly Close” of CultureLabs project. Under the coordination of FST, people coming from different parts of the world, are visiting 4 museums of SMA, and they will contribute to compare and blend together different cultural heritages and experiences, creating a new storytelling (published as comic or graphic novel) that will taste of ingredients never mixed before.

Specifically, the museums that have been involved in the project are: Natural History Museum, Botanical Garden, Calculation Instruments Museum and Gipsoteca of Ancient Art. Their collections of animals, plants, calculation instruments and copies of ancient pieces of art that testify our cultural, scientific and natural heritage, represent a key to generate empathy, curiosity in the pilot participants that will be invited to enrich collection bringing new contents and points of view.

[1] From the UNHCR report Global Trends of Forced Displacement in 2018:

https://www.unhcr.org/statistics/unhcrstats/5d08d7ee7/unhcr-global-trends-2018.html

Culture Labs at Internet Festival 2019 - Our video collection

Did you miss the CultureLabs event at Internet Festival 2019? Would you like to explore more the key-concept of social innovation, participatory approach and co-design?

There is good news! You can relive the best moments in our video collection, the contribution of the speakers is now on our Youtube channel. Subscribe here.

 

CultureLabs-Internet-Festival

A good opportunity to talk with chefs!

In collaboration with Internet Festival – Shaping Future, CultureLabs organises the event entitled Labs of Cultures. Processes, strategies and good practices for the challenges of contemporary society.

It will be an occasion to listen to the voices of some social innovators, actually our Chefs (both Italian and foreign), who every day implement models, strategies and techniques, with which they respond to concrete needs of a community and promote its social development.
It will be a good opportunity to learn about international examples in which digital innovation is at the service of social innovation, and participatory approaches trigger effective paths of inclusion.

Why at Internet Festival?

Internet Festival is the most important Italian event devoted to digital innovation. Since 2012 it has addressed a large and heterogeneous audience, introducing the most recent and interesting technological results, and showing how the digital innovation impacts diverse areas of our life: from culture to health, from school to economy, from music to food…

The event of Saturday 12 of October will be the occasion to explore how digital innovation serves social innovation. After the introduction of the day and the greetings from Tuscany Region, Victoria Barnett and Wesley Taylor will bring the experience of Design Justice, an international network, born in the United States, which has been involved for many years, striving to create design practices that center those who stand to be most adversely impacted by design decisions in design processes, such as: indigenous peoples, communities of color, poor and working-class people, the sick and disabled, migrants, LGBTQ people, women and femmes.

Then, Mario Tronco will talk about the Piazza Vittorio Orchestra, a project born in 2002 and driven by artists, intellectuals and cultural operators who revived through the music the Piazza dell’Esquilino, namely the multi-ethnic district of Rome. Piazza Vittorio Orchestra is a multiethnic orchestra that has been able to enhance the cultural richness of a degraded district using music as an effective glue. Since 2002 the Orchestra has represented a successful example that mixes musical languages, being aware that mixing cultures produces beauty.

Then, it will be the turn of Nadia Pantidi. She is a lecturer at the School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork (UCC) and a member of the People and Technology Research Group. Her research spans the areas of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Design and Psychology with a particular focus evaluating and designing interventions and technologies that are sensitive to values, practices and experiences of end-users. Nadia will explain how digital technologies and services can support new forms of community engagement.
Labs of Cultures will be also the occasion to present the latest progress of the CultureLabs digital platform and launch the upcoming pilots starting in October, in Italy, UK and Finland.

The public attending the event will be allowed to interact with the guests, stimulate reflections using the Mentimeter app.

Here the detailed programme of the event

15.00 – Welcome greetings – Roberto Ferrari (Tuscany Region)
15.15 – CultureLabs. Digital technologies and cultural heritage at the service of social inclusion – Eirini Kaldeli (CultureLabs)
15.45 – Links, connections and differences between CultureLabs and other best practices and projects
15.55 – Design Justice Network – Victoria Barnett and Wesley Taylor (Design Justice)
16.35 – The Piazza Vittorio Orchestra – Mario Tronco (Piazza Vittoria Orchestra)
17.05 – Digital Futures For, With, By the People – Nadia Pantidi (UCC)
17.25 – Final discussion / Q&A – with the journalist Claudia Fusani

Further information on: https://www.internetfestival.it/en/-/labs-of-cultures