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Description of initiative
Back to the future! is a cultural participation project and a festival dedicated to contemporary themes and artistic languages. Back to the future! designs new relationships between culture and citizenship, between people of different generations and with different biographies, experiencing art as a deep sharing and discovery of the potential of a territory. Back to the future! was born from an intergenerational artistic co-creation process, Let’s Keep In Touch, and from an under 30 participatory direction, Catch Up!, to realise an innovative festival in the Quartiere Adriano.
Catch Up! is a training and co-design process, a participatory artistic direction formed by a group of youngsters under 30 experimenting in the realisation of the BTTF festival. It is a process focused on transferring skills in the interpretation of contemporary languages and in the management of multidisciplinary and cross-media events. The Catch Up! group is the protagonist of the process of cultural programming, organisation and promotion of the BTTF festival, where it expresses its own point of view on the present.
Let’s Keep in Touch is a journey in which people from different generations and biographies get involved in the co-creation of an immersive performance, a collective story of Quartiere Adriano. The group shares the ideation, realisation and presentation of the work, involving the local community and defining the most urgent and compelling themes. The artwork is programmed within the BTTF festival schedule.
Magnete is the new Community Point within the Lacittaintorno programme by Fondazione Cariplo in collaboration with the Municipality of Milan. A place for care and culture, a space for relations and plurality for the Quartiere Adriano and the city. Magnete proposes a hybrid and multifunctional model, combining art, live performances, food, training, social inclusion, innovation and much more, to give back to the territory and the city a place where to experiment the theme “Care as Culture. Culture as Care”.
Located in the north-east of Milan, Quartiere Adriano is a peripheral area, with an agricultural and industrial past, today a residential area. A heterogeneous district, capable of including different cultures, creating different relationships with the city centre and bringing its past into dialogue with new visions for the future.
This is a project by Ecate, within the scope of La Città Intorno, a program of Fondazione Cariplo, in collaboration with Magnete, Risonanze Network, Dominio Pubblico, cheFare, Sinitah
Themes: Culture and...
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Results, benefits, impact and lessons learnt
1) Activities (2 participatory laboratories, 272 hours total of training and co-design, 17 participants at the training and co-design activities, 12 of them under 30)
Through these activities, the participants gained skills in the cultural design field, artistic direction and management. They were able to co-direct a festival and co-create an art piece, deciding the topics and issues to focus on after a research period spent exploring the neighbourhood. In this way, their priorities, frustrations and pains were explored and expressed during the festival and through the co-created immersive performance. A way to feel together and less lonely between participants and with the targeted audience.
2) Outputs (1 Festival co-designed, 5 performances, 13 performers of which 6 under 35, 1 immersive site-specific performance co-created, 1 photographic exhibition about the neighbourhood)
The festival and performance were occasions to set the discourse and break the silence, and the audience reacted positively, interacting after the performances with the group of young people that directed the festival.
3) Staff and Partners (13 partners, 6 of those national networks and 7 from the local territory, 8 cultural workers under 35, 1 internship activated from the participants' group)
The staff and partners created opportunities for growth for all the people involved. One internship was activated to provide job opportunities to one particularly involved participant.
4) Audience and Communities (300 participants at the festival, plus 100 interviewees from local communities, 150.882 reached people on social media, 2.424 interactions)
Being the first edition of the festival, in a new cultural centre just opened in the neighbourhood, the audience response was a success. The public was present and the feedbacks collected were good. One key lesson learnt is that for the next edition we must use more the territory and less the rooms of the cultural centre.