Mirmica recognizes artistic expression as a way to promote the beauty and well-being of individuals, organizations and society.
We consider, in a manner akin to J. Dewey, that aesthetic experience is in perfect continuity with everyday life, with everyone's life, wherever it manifests itself and in whatever form, in personal or professional pursuit, in the amateur or professional sphere, in the solitude of an individual or in the sociality of a group, an organization, a community.
Mirmica's practices and modes of action are not identified with techniques or notions that apply to all projects, people, and organizational and territorial contexts involved, but with a set of underlying principles that characterize each of its interventions.
Mirmica is constantly searching for experiences that can emerge from the dialogue with people, groups, communities, other organisations. We believe that each situation has its own unique and specific characteristics that must be valued and preserved, and that Mirmica has therefore to maintain a flexible identity and a vocation for collaboration and sharing.
This is why we do not identify ourselves in one or more intervention models that are valid for all occasions, but first and foremost seek to activate a dialogue that allows us to define common goals, strategies and practices each time.
Working in complex and delicate situations has helped us progressively realise that innovating from the specificities also means working with the limit: the limit as a boundary to be overcome, yes, but also the limit as a resource.
In a culture marked by the dichotomies between 'mind' and 'body', between 'reason', 'aesthetics' and 'affect', we try to give our contribution in integrating the dimensions of experience and the value fields associated with them.
This is why Mirmica promotes methodologies and practices that put people in training at the centre of the learning process, involving them in an active, meaningful, autonomous and creative way in defining and realising their own path. We believe that knowledge and action are closely intertwined and we develop pathways with a strong workshop component that weaves together bodies, senses and reasons. We believe that active methodologies, if developed in the context of respect for personal and group desires, make it possible to build more solid understanding, a knowledge integrated with one's personal characteristics, and a strengthening of transversal skills. At all ages.
The most important innovations often happen where production pressures find a way to ease and a space and time for research driven by curiosity, pleasure or the emergence of unexpected needs or desires can open up.
This is the case with the great scientific and technological innovations, and it is also the case with those in the artistic, personal, social and community spheres.
To nourish the space of the useless is to help build practices and environments of experimentation where new ideas, resources, modes of expression, meanings can emerge.
In the field of artistic research, for us this means trying to support embryonic pathways that lie outside productive schemes
In contexts that experience very strong pressures and highly standardised procedures, as may be the case in some companies and organisations, cultivating the space of the useless becomes a means of having the time to rethink oneself, develop one's imagination and elaborate a different way of doing things.
In contexts at risk of social exclusion, where 'being useless' is a condition imposed by personal discomfort and the social system, cultivating the space of the useless also becomes a means of claiming the value that certain experiences can offer to society and its well-being, overcoming a passivising vision of care.
In all cases, it is a matter of creating a context that puts the most peripheral visions, excluded from the field of the already known, at the centre. There where something important can manifest itself.
Mirmica seeks to realise projects that can last permanently, or have long-term effects, and that can help create and strengthen the connections that hold together, even in conflict, individuals, groups, organisations and societies.
We believe that the prospects for innovation and change can best emerge when one is able to act, in an interconnected manner, on different levels.
Whether we work with an individual person or an organisation, we know that we are only one component of a story much bigger and much more important than ourselves.
We can be, with all our tools, a small element that can help develop and tell this intricate story.
We attribute great importance to reflecting on the practices we are implementing and to making them explicit. We have elaborated a series of basic principles for our action, deriving them from experience, from the training exchanges carried out over the years with our international partners and with the models and epistemologies developed in the scientific and humanistic fields. We know, however, that this reflexive practice is important precisely if it does not freeze, if it remains alive and is always ready to question itself. Today we are here.