It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): OHT [Office for a Human Theatre] Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Filippo Last name of representative: Andreatta Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Balteri 5 Town: Rovereto Postal code: 38068 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 329 217 6734 E-mail:info@oht.tn.it Website:http://www.oht.art/en/
Little Fun Palace Nomadic School is a caravan, a device for co-learning experience taking place annually in high-mountain locations in the Alps. Open to everyone, the Nomadic School involves a heterogenous group of participants, mentors and local-players, while focusing on innovative methodologies such as co-learning within and from the Alpine landscape. The weather becomes part of our School in very concrete ways; from changing our plans because it’s raining to scaring participants because a cloud has swallowed us.
Considering the Alps as aesthetic territory that has political implications, the Nomadic School bridges the Performing Arts with other disciplines such as Natural Sciences, Architecture and Anthropology. Moving through a trans-disciplinary approach, the School asks participants to reconsider their positions within the world, questioning the relationship between the arts and environment into a landscape that is understood as a co-author of our own reality. We do expect participants to reconsider their positions by doing a School where the effects of the climate are stronger and more effective on a daily basis or, even, on a hourly basis.
The caravan moves around the Alps since 2020. It creates a nomadic community embracing mutability and recognising itself as part of a space that does not belong to us alone. Therefore, we co-learn from the mountains and by their open and remote locations, deeply exposed to the impact of climate change, and in close relationship with the intangible cultural heritage of the communities living in it. The Alps are not merely a backdrop for the School but a constituent element, a subject that shapes our own artistic and pedagogical experience.
Alpine-landscape
Performing Arts
Co-learning
Cross-border
Community
Climate activism invites to consider landscapes not as mere backdrops for human activities, but as active elements that exists per se. The Nomadic School promotes and transports this approach to the field of Performing Arts embracing a vision in which landscapes are the quintessence of the world understood as a space in which life is shared with others.
In line with this, the School promotes the democratisation of the stage, where the scenery is not just a backdrop to the drama but an active part of it. The current aesthetic regime of theatre is in fact still strongly focused on people as the centre of action and plot. Therefore, an ecological turn in theatre-making is at the core of the School by democratising all the elements involved in the artistic process; a metaphor for opening up theatre to different perspectives, downsizing the role of the human being in favour of an overall vision that accounts for complexity, coexistence and interdependence. Within this course, Little Fun Palace Nomadic School embraces anthropologist Anna Tsing's definition of unintentional design applied to landscape: "That is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and non-human. The design is clear in the landscape ecosystem. But none of the agents planned this effect. Humans join with others in creating landscapes of unintentional design”.
A fragile and unintentional landscape in which the organisers take all necessary measures to minimise the impact of their presence. Environmental protection protocols are stipulated with the local authorities, the utmost care is taken to minimise the waste generated during the Nomadic School. Interaction with local fauna and flora is the subject of attention in order to avoid any detrimental alteration to the alpine environment. All these measures are an integral part of the educational background that the school builds up and transmits to all those taking part.
Little Fun Palace Nomadic School is an aesthetic experience driven by climate change.
In Chiara Pagano’s words, participant of the first edition and mentor two years later, the Nomadic School is “arriving in a place where one can love anything. Where one can choose to embrace the whole sky or the smallest, faintest stars. Where desire is free and the gaze finds no obstacles”. Chiara’s experience highlights the aesthetic-cum-political value of Performing Arts, which is the simultaneous creation of the innermost and outside world. An outer world highly exposed to the effects of climate change and that mirrors the inner landscape, the human one.
The School conveys a more conscious and sustainable enjoyment of the mountain environment, transforming the Alps into a decisive element also for its daily routine which changes upon weather conditions, collective discussion and individual needs. Besides the dialogue and relationship with the mentors, the School includes free space for participants to share among each others their own interests, practices and ideas. In this way, we believe, participants recognise themselves both as a collective and as individuals. Furthermore, we dedicate a whole day of hiking with alpine geologists and/or botanists to connect with the morphology and the origin of the land we are in. To enter the landscape and encouraging respect for biodiversity and the intangible cultural heritage of the mountains, while co-learning from them. The Nomadic School therefore invites its participants to negotiate their actions with their surrounding through a caravan that is, to all intents and purposes, an exercise in inhabiting space in a non-hierarchical and inclusive manner.
Designed as a flexible framework into which programmable spaces can be plugged, the structure of Little Fun Palace has as its ultimate goal the possibility of change at the behest of its users. The caravan is an homage to the Fun Palace; the cult project by sir Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood that back in the 60’s belonged to a generation of British creatives who used addressed the future and moral obligations toward theirs users.
In our School, users are a heterogeneous group in terms of gender, cultural and social backgrounds, age and education. Following an international call for applications, 12 people from different places in Europe and the world are selected, and some of the participants return in subsequent years as mentors, creating a circular ecology of hierarchies within the School itself. To ensure that participation in the Nomadic School is fully affordable, it has always been free of charge; it guarantees board and lodging in order to promote participation by those who, for economic reasons, do not have access to alternative educational paths and to incredible places such as the Alps. Furthermore, the School includes local scientists, biologists, geologists and hikers to enter the landscape and familiarising with its immaterial heritage as co-author of our own space and pedagogical experience. Finally, part of the activity is proposed to wider communities, through a programme of public activities, available also through digital channels to make those places accessible to those who have precluded them, too.
By taking place in the Alps, Little Fun Palace embraces the local and yet European character emphasising the need to transcend borders; contributing to give new centrality to marginal and peripheral places. By making high-mountain accessible, spaces for intercultural and artistic exchange, our School contributes developing a new narrative, identity and perception of the Alpine cross-border area, which lies at the centre of Europe.
The Nomadic School takes place in public spaces in the conviction that these are the places that, more than others, allow the co-existence of differences. The decision to locate within the Alpine context allows the Nomadic School to meet, in a deliberate and casual manner, people who are different from those specific to the cultural sphere and, above all, from the urban sphere, which often tends to self-elect itself as the centre of the landscape.
The need to find new educational and awareness raising methods are topics emerging with increasing force in the Alpine communities. Such pressing issues have to do with our relationship with the natural elements, the collective construction of space, the limits of the Anthropocene, the biodiversity of our ecosystem, the importance of time together and the possibilities for innovation in respect of the common heritage. Moving from the priorities of the space and mountain communities within which it is located, the Nomadic School looks at the potential of putting landscape and art into dialogue. It creates a heterogeneous and ephemeral community that experiments with artistic pedagogical forms rooted in the territory. In doing so, the School generates spaces for reflection in which participants, mentors and spectators confront each other through lectures, reading-sessions, performances, meetings and workshops. At the core of such reflections are the relationship between artistic production and environmental activism, differences and possible balances between urban and non-urban environments, and the emblematic relationship between art and landscape.
All this while being exposed to the unpredictability of the weather in the high mountains and the effects of the climate crisis, which materialise the difficulty and fragility of living in a space that is not only human and, definitely, not exclusively urban.
Little Fun Palace Nomadic School is a project by Office for a Human Theatre, a theatre company based on the Italian slope of the Alps and founded by Filippo Andreatta who has been defined by Corriere della Sera as the most experimental theatre-director encountered in many years (in “The Theatre and the emergency”, 23/IV/2020). OHT has been working with landscapes, daily personal politics and public spaces since its foundation and the Nomadic School materialises the need of evading the limits of Performing Arts in relationship to climate change.
Therefore, OHT has involved local administrations, cultural associations, training subjects and realities promoting actions of care and belonging to the natural Alpine context. Such as the Autonomous Province of Trento - the Departments for youth and cultural policies, the municipalities that administer the territories involved in the initiatives, the natural and science museum of Trento - MUSE, the Geological Museum of the Dolomites in Predazzo and the Trentino School of Management - School for the Government of the Territory and Landscape.
Dialogues and exchange have also been initiated and pursued with mountain-centred associations such as the Società Alpinisti Tridentini (SAT), which acts in support of knowledge and protection of alpine nature, study of the mountains and support for the populations living there.
These local realities are complemented by collaboration with world-class institutions ranging from Performing Arts to Architecture that, over the years, have supported, produced, hosted or collaborated with Little Fun Palace. Among the others; the MAXXI contemporary art and architecture museum (Rome, IT), festival Latitude Contemporaine (Lille, FR), ÖGFA_Next Up / Architekturtage (Vienna, AT), Carrefour de Théâtre (Quebec, CA) and Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turin, IT).
Performing Arts are, par excellence, transformative. They can change yourself, your feelings, in powerful ways as they’re relational. It’s all about you and someone else, you and something else. And yet those feelings are ephemeral; once the work -therefore the relationship- is over, Performing Arts’ effects vanish. Accordingly, Little Fun Palace Nomadic School has been created with the precise aim of bringing disciplines into relationship and building safe and free spaces where reflections from artistic, scientific and social fields can interact.
Over three years have been invited choreographers, geo-designers, musicians, students, anthropologists, glaciologists, botanists, architects, philosophers, scientists, cooks, alpine choirs, filmmakers, curators, composers and many more. Activities span over construction workshops, lectures, screenings, seminars, micro-performances, concerts, walks, cooking, bonfire readings and many more to promote a multifaceted approach to languages and different realities.
All of these micro-ecologies have contributed to the creation of a dialogical caravan, an antenna that picks up form and launches into the landscape multitudes of voices that together contribute to the redefinition of Performing Arts via the relationship between different disciplines and nature, declined it in the mountain environment in which they find themselves. By mixing disciplines and inviting them to dialogue on urgent topics in a free, independent and collaborative way, Little Fun Palace Nomadic School explores reality in its facets and in its different fields, showing the complexity of our ecosystem.
Since the industrial revolution, art schools and universities have increasingly aligned their programmes towards a certain standardisation and internationalisation of knowledge. Yet, the most significant educational experiences of the last century (e.g., the bauhaus, UNOVIS or Black Mountain College) have demonstrated the importance of providing open, free, and safe spaces in which to experiment with new languages, both artistically and behaviourally and thus socially.
Little Fun Palace Nomadic School belong to the wave of plenty other innovative efforts enacted by artists who have created self-organised art schools all over the world. The specificity and innovative character of the Nomadic School is then not in its self-organised nature, but in re-claiming and restating the absolute centrality of where it takes place; one of the geographical, social and cultural peripheries of Europe.
Through our Nomadic School, the alpine landscape and the intangible cultural heritage of the communities living in it become co-author of the artistic and pedagogical experience. Moving from transdisciplinary and horizontal approach to education, our caravan implements a path of co-learning, considering that being an artist does not only mean producing artistic works, but also speaking and behaving in a certain way, being part of society and promoting its eco-social transformation.
We are convinced that the future of art schools does not lie in institutions made of bricks or concrete, but above all in ways of transmitting and exchanging knowledge between people. Paraphrasing the great artist Claes Oldeenburg who defined the best art school as "simply being a warm room", we would like to believe that "The best art school can simply be a warm caravan".
The replicability of Little Fun Palace is inherent in its very form: our School was created to be nomadic, so that it can find fulfilment each time it is realised, adapting to the space around it and accommodating the mutations it undergoes. There’re already two examples, different in form and manner, showing the future potential of the School to be further shared, to move around the world and inhabit different spaces and communities.
With La Serre Art Vivants in Montreal, a second Little Fun Palace was built in 2021 and a cultural programme was created that touched six realities across Quebec, from the urban context to the typical Canadian moors. At that time, an operational method was defined that dissolved the artistic authorship of OHT in favour of the creation of common project trajectories that were subsequently developed locally by individual curators and/or artists from the community itself.
In 2022 at FAR° Nyon festival in Switzerland, a third Little Fun Palace was built in collaboration with a group of teenagers who transformed the caravan into a safe space in which they could recognise themselves and carry out a series of artistic and cultural activities open to their community. The caravan has become a rehearsal room, a stage for concerts and a meeting place for teenagers that had long been missing in the local community.
For further development, we are establishing contacts with the New European Bauhaus of the Mountains, to favour the dissemination of our School’s programme towards professionals and communities interested in mountain ecosystems and Performing Arts. Moreover, a series of comparisons with European and non-European realities are underway in order to radicalise and broaden the project's presence in the Alpine context but, at the same time, to deepen the relationship between other communities and turn our gaze to other cross-border areas crucial for cultural heritage and political urgency, such as the Mediterranean.
Little Fun Palace is an experiment in which individuality combines with collective moments.
Inspired by artists and pedagogues such as Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College, where life and study were not separated, our School continually invents its own model by changing shape through workshops that modify -metaphorically and literally- the caravan and how it fits into the place that hosts us. Specific components are designed and built to immerse Little Fun Palace in its surroundings and thus deepen its position in society, its geography in the world. Moreover, the School takes care of each other by organising shifts regarding food and cleaning and, therefore, becoming a study of the world and part of it by denying hierarchical transmission of knowledge. It willingly avoids separations between moments of co-learning, fun, meeting, collective and individual experiences:
7am | Mattia starts preparing breakfast. Chiara and Anouk, two participants still a bit sleepy, helps him
8:00 | Breakfast is ready. Today the sun is rising-&-shining
9:30 | Choreographer Annamaria Ajmone starts the warming-up on how to move ungraciously
11:30 | We need to relocate Annamaria’s workshop inside as it might be raining soon
12:00 | In the kitchen, Mattia is preparing lunch. This time helped by Charlotte and Cosimo
13:00 | Lunch is ready
14:30 | Annamaria workshops outdoor as the weather looks stable now
18:00 | In the kitchen, Mattia is preparing dinner. This time helped by Gabriella and Dylan
19:00 | Dinner is ready
20:30 | Filippo and Silvia prepares the bonfire. All the group comes along and we start reading Frankenstein collectively at the bonfire during the night
01:15 | Everyone has left; only Xuetong, Silvia and Sarah are still reading and stars are above them
Little Fun Palace Nomadic School takes shape within the alpine landscape. The peripheral character of such landscape is framed not simply in terms of deprivation, but as a place of radical possibility and a space of resistance, a place that offers the possibility of a different perspective to look, create and imagine alternatives and new worlds. The geographical distance of the places that host the school is therefore valorised as a strategic element for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse.
In the wake of this awareness, which involves all the territories defined as marginal and peripheral, the Nomadic School builds a community and a space for action that places a specific landscape in dialogue with the discourse of climate and environmental activism. It does so in order to promote an ecological turn in the fields of the arts and theatre, focusing on the aesthetic, cultural and political significance of landscape.
The Nomadic School stimulates a rethinking of the balance between humans and the environment and builds a new sensitivity to the ways in which mountains are used and the fragility of the mountain environment. By stimulating cultural production based on these themes, the caravan facilitates the dissemination of new awareness and transformative knowledge through a language - that one of art - that proved capable of reaching different communities.
The global challenge of knowledge-access is addressed by the School through the offer of higher education in the arts, an offer totally absent in the local context. The School rejects disciplinary separation and, instead, looks to a different educational horizon as a real opportunity to share practices, knowledge and know-how, ensuring that everyone develops skills that can expand their abilities.
The caravan of Little Fun Palace was born in 2018 and during the Covid-19 pandemic turned into the Nomadic School, developing its first, week-long edition at the Viote on Monte Bondone, a natural biotope in Trentino - Alto Adige / Südtirol at 1,600 metres above sea level.
This first call, with no age or gender restrictions, was answered by over 130 people with age-span between 20 and 40, from various places in Europe and belonging to different disciplines, artistic, scientific and humanistic.
The experience was repeated the following summer in the same place and obtained more than 190 applications; the number of School days increased, as did the origin of those applying to take part. The following year, summer 2022, the School moves to the peaks of the Fassa Dolomites and exceeds 2,200 metres above sea level and 260 applications; the School days become 10 and applications also arrive from the Americas.
In the meantime, the activity received recognition and support by local authorities as well as by museums and educational institutions. In 2022, it received the Quality Mention of the Fare Paesaggio 2022 Award. The School received invitations to be presented and replicated, in Canada, Quebec (2021), Switzerland (2022) and at CampoBase festival occurring in the Alps, specifically in Val d'Ossola (2022).
Planning is currently underway for the fourth year of the Nomadic School, which will last for two weeks allowing a deeper immersion in the Alpine landscape, and the involvement of artists and researchers from educational realities that are experimenting with innovative methodologies such as the Floating University in Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. The relationship with these institutes and research centres is aimed at building a network that supports the dissemination of the Nomadic School and its recognition as a continuous process of knowledge.
By bringing the Performing Arts into dialogue with contemporary ecological issues, the Nomadic School promotes a widespread awareness of the need to abandon a human centred approach in favour of a horizontal, balanced relationship with the ecosystem.
It does so, first and foremost, by taking place in peripheral locations of the Alps, where the relevance of environmental issues is of utmost clarity. Further on, our School favours the mixing of languages, the opening-up of inclusive spaces of co-learning, and the exchange of knowledge in a collective framework where new points of view emerge through encounter.
In this sense, the Nomadic School embraces a transformative endeavour, adopting Performing Arts as its primary tool and moving beyond them. Indeed, Performing Arts not only narrate and perform existence, but they also promote the emergence of different gazes that become a multiplier effect for those who believe that "contact is content".
