Art as a constituent force for the social change
“ART AS A CONSTITUENT FORCE FOR THE SOCIAL CHANGE”
Moderator: Jonathan Ferramola, COSPE, director of Terra di Tutti Film festival
Guests:
Sylvia de Fanti (ITA): actress and founder member of the Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome, a movement of performing arts operators. This movement have fought for three years for common goods and culture and it continues to realise practices of common goods. She graduated in Science of Communication and she specialised in cultural anthropology.
Alaa Talbi (TUN): Project coordinator of the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights. As a respected poet, he tries to retrieve regional languages for the enhancement of a widespread civil consciousness for social change through street events.
The dialogue deals with the theme of art as a propulsive force towards the enlightenment of the Mediterranean at a time of radical change, the establishment of a new civil dignity and the claim for a more participatory democracy. The moderator starts asking: “how can we make art a tool for the revitalization of democratic dialogue and a constituent space for the protection of common goods?” Alaa Talbi presents his experience of street poetry such as one of these informal bottom-up experiences in the process of artistic fight, which are fundamental to create an atmosphere of sharing in the society. Making art in public spaces is an act of political claim. The first claim naturally concerns the freedom of expression, the first of all fundamental freedoms. Street poetry is a project which has permitted to engage a lot of people through arts. Only as a second step, activists and artists who have been involved in this project have tried to elaborate what happened in those months of revolt, and they realised that the cultural, organised and collective resistance should be a political fight tool, and an efficient way to make explode contradictions, not only in Maghreb. Also in Italy, Sylvia de Fanti underlines, twenty years of cultural obscurantism have blocked the narrative of the present. In the last three years, the experience of Teatro Valle in Rome, in which Sylvia has been a protagonist, have demonstrated at the contrary that art is the capacity to have a vision, fundamental function to generate a change; art is a powerful tool to dismantle walls. Opening the creative process, as Teatro Valle’s artists and activists have done, is fundamental to activate metamorphoses and energies, to reveal resilience. For both artists, it is important to create connections, networks, and co-productions between the two shores, as festival and shared spaces. Mediterranean artists’ networks can create a culture, which is transnational, independent and shared. The connections should be encouraged and facilitated. Spaces of mobility of ideas and people have to be built. We should encourage spaces and opportunities to produce free and accessible culture. According to the two artists, we can build the Mediterranean Citizenship through forums and forms of co-production, events and shared activities, designed in an articulated and not monolithic manner, identifying in this way common, autonomous and non auto referential languages. We can talk about Mediterranean Citizenship only when the idea of the “other”, different but with the same rights, will be accepted. Education and training are a fundamental step to build the Mediterranean Citizenship: only educating we can build an alternative, explaining that the free movement of ideas and people is not invasion or colonisation, but a fruitful contamination. Alaa and Sylvia conclude claiming that it is essential to gain coverage in the media to spread the artistic work, as well as telling and showing their work, to build peace and to strengthen.
