A Manifesto for Cantieri Meticci
Cantieri Meticci unites artists from more than twenty different countries, who exchange their knowledge, rituals, and legends here.
We are Italians, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees.
We are children, teenagers, men and women, seniors.
Our name is Cantieri Meticci because we feel at home when we invent new places, when there’s work to do, when there is change.
Our home is in-between: in an ephemeral world, we are nomadic creatures, who build ourselves while walking and meeting people.
Yet, we like having roots in the territory we live in, in our neighbourhoods.
We love walking down the streets of our city, in flesh and blood, and creating new spaces.
Making theatre (in all its aspects) is our raft, what keeps us all together.
It’s important for us to be We, always longing to be stronger and more numerous.
We mix together, we make ourselves every time new: that's how we are crossbred, meticci indeed.
We like mixing people, ideas, and stories. Mother tongues, languages, and arts.
During the first months of the Atlas of Transitions project, Cantieri Meticci has been holding theatrical and artistic workshops thanks to its neighbourhood companies - Compagnie Meticce di Quartiere - in crucial areas of the suburbs of Bologna, in particular at Croce del Biacco, San Donato and Navile. Each group consists of about 15 people and one out of two of them is an asylum seeker, a refugee or a migrant. The workshops’ schedule includes weekly meetings on theatrical and creative practices in order to prepare the participants for a final performance, which will take place in the first half of May 2018.
All the groups of people involed in the workshops engage with a process of reflection about and collection of stories as a form of preparation for a subsequent major event, in which professional artists from Cantieri Meticci company as well as the new talents encountered at the workshops will share the stage in an unusual show such as 'Autostrada del Sud', southern highway, which will be performed twice during the international festival organised by Atlas of Transitions, 15th-24th June, in Bologna.
Text and pictures – Alessia Del Bianco