South of Imagination/ A Sud dell'Immaginazione

06 Apr 22—31 Dec 22

Artists

Valerio Rocco Orlando

Info

CCA Derry~Londonderry has partnered with South of Imagination/ A Sud dell'Immaginazione, Italy. CCA is inviting students from local schools and colleges to attend a workshop with South of the Imagination. The aim is to open up a space for discussion, dialogue, collaboration and exchange of ideas.

This project is led by Valerio Rocco Orlando, Founder and Director of South of Imagination, and Raffaella Frascarelli Director Nomas Foundation, Rome. Workshops will be organised and facilitated by Laura McCafferty, Public Programmes Curator, CCADLD, with project support by Catherine Hemelryk, Director, CCADLD.

South of Imagination Workshop Matera, Italy

South of Imagination is a project by artist Valerio Rocco Orlando, curated by Nomas Foundation - aimed at establishing a new school of the arts in Matera, Italy. Valerio will meet online with young people (16–22) from Derry~Londonderry with the aim of gathering as a community, getting to know students and educators who live in this area, to share new ideas about the school that will be created in Matera.

The South of Imagination art school, Matera, Italy

This meeting will take the form of an online workshop. Together with students from different schools, we will investigate the role of art in everyday life, in terms of self-awareness, exchange, and transformation. The aims are dialogue, discourse among Institutions in the Mediterranean and North of Europe, learning from each other, sharing how you see things, exploring what role artists have in re-imagining, building long term relationships, and asking how we can create a glocal network?

On 6 April 2022 students from North West Regional College, Derry~Londonderry took part in our first online workshop. For information on how your school or college could get involved with this project please email info@ccadld.org.

Supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Derry City & Strabane District Council.

South of Imagination/ A Sud dell'Immaginazione

Background to South of Imagination

A digital educational platform brings together diverse communities through collaborative workshops—online and in-person—and mobilizes multidisciplinary spaces founded by international artists in decentralized territories. This process-based research refers to the unconventional knowledge produced by the demodiversity of the South of Europe/ Mediterranean and will evolve into a multi-channel video installation for Museo del Novecento in Milan to be shown in the CCA Project Space.

The cultural sphere of the South of Europe/ Mediterranean reinstates critical thinking, draws new values, and builds spaces of subjective and collective freedom as an alternative to the economic neoliberal paradigm. This transformative process inspired the artist to create a platform for mutual learning, an intersubjective horizon aimed at demodernizing and decolonizing education. What are the teachings offered by Southern epistemologies that transform the world through a specific desire to understand it? How can we envision and foster a self-reflective education which can generate knowledge, equity, solidarity beyond neoliberalism? Valerio Rocco Orlando starts from these issues to stimulate forms of knowledge production grounded on active and intersubjective listening.

A series of nomadic workshops—activated together with Nomas Foundation and Sapienza University of Rome—invites organizations, universities, academia, museums, and local communities to put their sociocultural resources into play, as a way to imagine an innovative pedagogical path. The archives of knowledge developed by these encounters will be transformed into the assets to establish an independent school in Southern Italy—one of the key areas in the economic emancipation of the Mediterranean. This multidisciplinary and international initiative will be located in a state-owned building granted to the artist by the Municipality of Matera for thirty years.

Project supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition 2020), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.