Alcune immagini di Dorin Mihai dal seminario Limen. Beyond Borders che si è tenuto a Mondaino il 28 e il 29 giugno all’intero del progetto europeo Stronger Peripheries.
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Mondaino, as you may have seen, is a small medieval village located on the border between two regions, Marche and Emilia-Romagna. About one thousand three hundred inhabitants live here and are located between the countryside and the village. Obviously, our audience extends beyond the territorial borders of the country, coming from the neighboring areas.
Mondaino’s community has a long-lasting cultural and artisan history that has shaped the habits and traditions of this small village. Thus, the inhabitants grew up in this rich cultural environment, enjoying it also from an economic point of view. Also, those who live here, often, work in the local factories and they are more often elderly than young.
I am not originally from Mondaino, but I’m choosing it as my home ten years ago. I start to tell you shortly a specific episode that for me it is significant of how an “aesthetic community”, to use a Rancière’s definition, can be activated. As the French philosopher writes, an “aesthetic community does not mean a community made up of aesthetes but a community of meaning, or a sensus communis”. And more specifically he says:
What is common is 'sensation'. Human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together; and politics is about the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together’.
Here, I felt I was joining this “aesthetic community” that orbits the space of the theater in the woods at a very precise moment: the occasion was the workshop A week in the life proposed by the company Muta Imago when eight performers spent 24 hours a day for a week, in the life of a specific inhabitant of Mondaino. After a week of hospitality, each artist had another week to produce a portrait of his/her host. At the end of it, this whole aesthetic community came together to see the open rehearsals of the project, which then turned into a party.
This experience was a first "bond" between myself, the community and the theater. This bond does not always happen, and it is not easy to make it happen, but, through the actions that we have implemented over the years, we work to make this happen and to safeguard this mobile and heterogeneous community that has formed. In addition to the very important project named I Custodi delle residenzethat Enrico Frisoni will tell us about, the main projects we have are: The elementary school of theater and dance, which is a project aimed at primary, secondary and infant schools in the area, The daily bread. The multiplication of glances, a project dedicated to the citizens of Mondaino and its surroundings, and D.E.A. that is Residences of Art Exhibitions, a project curating exhibition within the foyer of the theater. I put these three mediation actions together because have a common goal: to create moments of encounter and sharing between artists and inhabitants; to create opportunities to have a meaningful experience within a temporary community; to have the experience of sharing common feelings. These meeting opportunities, this way of being together has increased a feeling of trust of the participants in the theater over the years, given by a constant and equal comparison with the artists without hierarchies and prejudice; in this occasion, where necessary dialogues and exchanges are attempted, bring to the surface that the community, defined by Appadurai as a "community of feeling", is that group that begins to imagine and feels things collectively. And, as Appadurai continues, "the imagination, especially when it is collective, can become the impulse for action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates the ideas of neighborhood and nation”: in other words, exercises of active citizenship are created.
Over the years I am realizing that this way of "being together" is not enough; it is necessary to stay inside and outside the theater space, share moments of conviviality as well as moments of vision and above all, share moments of participation in performative actions: for example, the opportunities generated by Silvia Gribaudi or Paola Bianchi’s dance workshops, where I too took part as an inhabitant among others, were fundamental moments of "bonding" between me, as mediator, the community and the theater. And still fundamental, and especially after the fracture created by the pandemic, was the stay of a company that lived for over a year in Mondaino and that managed to restore that bond. The Piccola Compagnia Dammacco has awakened the sense of participation, the sensus communis, and has done so by acting inside and outside the theater, proposing workshops, shows, and other meeting and banqueting actions. So, this is the trigger element for bringing citizens closer to their theater: staying and acting inside and outside the theater, inside and outside the performative action, to share an experience of vision and participation to imagine together.
*Intervento in occasione del seminario all’interno del panel L’altra metà delle residenze: la partecipazione dei cittadini e degli spettatori