What is the use of imagining? To build representations of the world, of relationships, of oneself. To multiply scenarios and possible alternatives. To escape from the tyranny of the now-here, to criticize it, to overthrow it. […] The imagination, however, is cultivated, trained, nourished, and when this does not happen it atrophies, becomes passive, discouraged. A person, a group, a people without imagination is automatically the victim of those who control the images for them. This is why imagining above all means doing politics.
– Matteo Meschiari, The great extinction. Imagining at the time of the collapse

How To Be Together is a research project investigating possible forms of togetherness and new relational geographies through a cohabitation experiment in a temporary camp by a community of 50 participants: an eco village that will appear like a summer mirage. The transformation of space was born as a real gesture of regeneration entrusted to the architect Matteo Ascani.

How To Be Together sounds like a question obsessively asked by the pandemic crisis in 2020, which deeply atomized the social fabric by emptying public spaces, relegating them to the sphere of forbidden desire and confining bodies into the private and individual sphere. Aware that collaborative practices can overthrow the critical scenario generated by the current neoliberal system, the village aspires to become a place for creating alternative scenarios, an exercise in worldmaking, a speculative act allowing to transform the cacophony of the present into the chorus of a unison. The camp is conceived as a turbine of multiple voices, bodies and perspectives, an imaginative site to cultivate and accelerate possible responses to current, urgent questions.

The participants will work in groups of 10 people, openly sharing visions and practices, supported by a facilitator that will accompany the workflow: starting from individual practices and experiences, we will try to formulate possible answers and collective actions. During this process, the question How To Be Together will widen and slowly shift to What can be done together that we could not do otherwise?

Each group will investigate How To Be Together starting from a specific perspective:

• Space Commoning: the spatial dimension as a ground to generate new postures and relations. Facilitated by Jozef Wouters and Bart Van den Eynde.
• Communication as a magic ritual: looking at communication as a ritual and a space-time opening able to channel invisible presences. Facilitated by Lotte Van Den Berg and Peter Aers / Building Conversation.
• More Than Human Ecosystem: investigating how we can be together with other beings, possible and impossible, unspeakable relationship with other species and presences in a more systemic and haunted Reality. Facilitated by Cristina Kristal Rizzo.
• Aesthetic and politics: the transformative power of art to trigger political change or create alternative political grounds. Facilitated by Riccardo Benassi.
• Wilderness as alternative knowledge: how to unlearn codes and behaviours by giving in to the power of children. Facilitated by Valentina Pagliarani and a group of 7 children.

Besides facilitators and participants, the camp will cross the artistic community of the Festival, constantly opening itself to the city, its people and the surrounding landscape, like a porous organism looking for impossible osmosis. The entire process will be constantly documented and monitored thanks to a team of young reporters from VIERNULVIER in Ghent.

MORE INFORMATION

Watch the live talk during Santarcangelo Festival about the project here.

CREDITS

A project conceived and curated by Chiara Organtini, Silvia Bottiroli, Frederik Le Roy, Sodja Lotker, Annalisa Sacchi, Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò – MOTUS

Organized by Santarcangelo Festival in collaboration with DAS Theatre in Amsterdam, KASK & CONSERVATORIUM School of Arts in Ghent, Haute École La Manufacture in Lausanne, Prague Performing Arts Academy, and Iuav – Theatre and Performing Arts in Venice

With support from BE PART art Beyond Participation, Embassy of the Netherlands, General Representation of the Flemish Community and the Region of Flanders, Muncipality of Ghent