Racconti dal quartiere

Workshop for young people on video creation and narration of a neighbourhood - 2017

With this project, Mirmica worked in Milan's Municipality 2, in collaboration with the Casa dell'ArtEducazione and the Tempo per l'Infanzia cooperative, to set up a body expression and video production workshop aimed at young foreigners who had just arrived in Italy. The underlying themes: their relationship with a neighbourhood in the process of discovery, with family, with friends.

Tales from the neighbourhood is part of the broader framework of the OPEN IT project (2017), organised by the Independent Theatre cultural association and funded by the Municipality of Milan. OPEN IT organised spaces for cultural and artistic relations between performers and the territory, to create a sense of community and aggregation through participatory cultural processes. Mirmica proposed to work in Municipio 2, in collaboration with the Casa dell'ArtEducazione (today Spazio ArtEducazione), to realise a video workshop with young foreigners attending the L2 course. This proposal gave rise to a work with 15 young people of different nationalities, who do not speak Italian, involved in a process of physical play and workshop, with the aim of investigating the Turro-Rovereto-Parco Trotter neighbourhood, and the themes they hold dear.

The final product: a video-story that, between the symbolic and the concrete, expresses invented and real stories, gives voice to the children's thoughts, and accompanies us to the places in the neighbourhood chosen by them, with the gaze of those who, that neighbourhood, are crossing it for the first time. Here it is.