WE-hope sailboat just passed the mark. At the turn of the buoy, our Cantastoria was presented at the Lincoln Festival in October 2021. Now, it's about shaping the educational experiences of migrants together. During the last partners’ meeting of WE-Hope, it was decided that the project will develop educational resources, with the migration of Di + in the all-Italian team composed by Lapsus and captained by Memoro.
The question of the relationship between art and education belongs to the nature of relational art that by its nature is a process and as such migrating.
How art, combined with education, can promote understanding of migrants’ lived experiences ?
Art is an alchemical process that is a process of transformation of matter that is based on practical, philosophical and esoteric knowledge. It is a collective process because it lives only in the relationship between human activity/s, technical procedures, study and experience. Art is a way of being of reality, with its own dimension and level of organization. Therefore, art lives/exists only in the particular situation we call present and in the particular condition we call relation.
(Miguel Benasayag, Le mythe de L’individu, 1998)
Art is always a collective political process. It exists only in the public dimension.
In WE-Hope, art extroverts the life of an anthropological group that calls itself "migrants" and "war survivors". It seeks the aesthetic coherence of the sphere. It has the gravitational pull of ethics. It lives in the atmosphere of sustainability. It is ongoing formation. For this reason we believe that a combined approach to art and training must start from the scientific observation of nature on some complex systems such as: the flight of starlings, the behavior of viruses, the intelligence of plants, the behavior of tumors. Because the creative formative process by its nature connects aspects of knowledge and non-linear looks starting from an esoteric nature.
Going a little bit random on "how":
the body as a "migrant" culture
being alive means being "contaminated”
the freedom and lightness of "navigating by sight" without defining everything right away
welcoming the mystery/ I don't understand/ the questions without immediate answers and relaunching them as a "migrant" element
start from fragility/error/difference as a substantial and positive element
see with the lateral eyes that maintain equidistance and guarantee one's own vital space, which is not the same for everyone but has a fundamental and salvific physical/geographical/cultural value
to accept/power the dissemination and dispersion in the collective/connective/geographical/anthropological fabric of micro-macro actions, to collect the results, and to make them public
use the experience of art in the installation WE-Hope as a track that, with the interviews collected by historians, can activate paths of dissemination with the social fabric to a wide spectrum
What we can do to promote social inclusion with a focus on Cantastoria?
Cantastoria's expressive model is perfectly suited for the purpose. By its inherent nature, it is the ultimate historically naive expression of social inclusion.
Cantastoria: nomadic movements in the squares // WE-Hope: small and widespread public actions
Cantastoria: telling a story in song // WE-Hope: with the score of the installation choir and the interviews collected, ask local choirs to interpret the score with the freedom to modify it. Using the logic of "lost in translation" pass a sound piece to another choir so that there is a continuous modification in both the score and the performance until the end of the tour.
Cantastoria: a story related to problematic contemporary facts and events + street performance become part of the collective cultural heritage of a community + described in the main static scenes // WE-Hope: involve schools to create stories with static or dynamic images related to migrants and/or related topics and publish them online.
Article written by Laura Morelli, Di +
Photo n. 1: frames by an Italian Cantastorie performance; fresco of the Chapel, Corpus Domini Church, Pagliaro BG IT ;
Photo n. 2: libretto of an Italian Cantastorie; portrait of Malawian griot, photo by Giovanni Diffidenti