#CUOREDINAPOLI - Una rivoluzionaria presa di coscienza
#CUOREDINAPOLI is a relational and educational artistic project conceived by the School of New Technologies of the Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, made up of about 150 students and 7 teachers who collaborate with each other in a horizontal and transversal way. It is a repeatable format that is consolidated in an action of co-planning with the inhabitants of the "periphery of meaning", neighborhoods in the center of the city, suffer from economic, social and cultural marginalization.
Local
Italy
{Empty}
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli - Corso di Nuove Tecnologie dell'Arte Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Francesco Last name of representative: Iandolo Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Teacher and School's Coordinator of Nuove Tecnologie dell'Arte / New Media Art Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via S. Maria di Costantinopoli 107 Town: Napoli Postal code: 80138 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 081 441900 E-mail:nuovetecnologiedellarte@gmail.com Website:http://www.nuovetecnologiedellarte.it
#CUOREDINAPOLI is a relational and educational artistic project conceived by the School of New Technologies of the Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples (from now "NTA"). It is a format, realized in Naples in 5 times (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019; the sixth edition will be realized in spring 2023), which develops an innovative teaching methodology, involving, for each edition, 7 teachers and about 150 students of the Academy (with an action that foresees, through the training of students who knowingly cross the shared territory, the sensitization of the community) in an action of co-planning with the inhabitants of the "peripheries of meaning" of the city: those neighborhoods that, despite being in the center of the city, suffer from economic, social and cultural marginalization. Each edition is built through the proactive participation of thousands of subjects (inhabitants, associations and traders of the neighborhood, as well as the students of NTA), bearers of a single common interest: the territory and its virtuous cultural, economic, social and relational dynamics.
#CUOREDINAPOLI is a participatory work of art, which arises from a specific teaching methodology that includes the relationship as a tool for building experience; the transversality, the contamination between knowledge and error as tools for research and study of the territory understood as an active part of the artistic process and not as a recipient of the work; the metropolitan public space as a field of action for the collective construction of a people specific "relational anthropological sculpture", which is achieved through a long process that provides for the students to settle in the area for 3-4 months, the study of economic and socio-cultural dynamics of the neighbourhood, the development of a network of relationships and co-planning actions which flow into a final work-event of the project, capable of generating virtuous dynamics of care for the territory, which lasts over time.
common territory
didactic
co-design
ethics
people specific
The project aims to activate in the community, through training and teaching, a sense of belonging and awareness of the territory.
The fundamental action is based on a "bottom-up" process, which does not envisage the insertion of new or foreign elements to the territory, but the rethinking and reinterpretation of the resources, of the tangible and intangible heritage and of the aesthetic signs that already characterize. In this way, new meanings and new readings of those places are sought, which allow to expand and diversify the points of view and perception of present life, opening up to future visions and dynamics of awareness of the shared territory.
The virtuous processes that the project activates allow the community to strengthen its sense of identity and to activate actions of care, possible through the sharing of choices: functional and aesthetic recovery of degraded spaces or areas.
The strength of the project consists in activating dynamics that last over time, even after the end of the project, becoming part of the self-determining community, also producing the implementation of sustainable commercial activities, also linked to the practices of know-how typical of local craftsmanship and productions of the most diverse genres. In the context of adult learning, the training that takes place by assuming the relational exchange with the territory has a significant pedagogical impact on a twofold level: in the formal sphere it allows students to contribute to the development and fine-tuning of some soft skills, such as for example the ability to read and analyze the context in terms of needs and potential, and, on a more informal side, for the inhabitants of the neighborhood a greater openness to novelty and a fruitful re-evaluation of their daily reality also in terms of resilience.
The final synthesis of the network process and of the relationships between students, teachers and the community is a party-work-event that is articulated within the urban itinerary and that thrives on the relationships between the various subjects who contribute to feed them through aesthetic devices (called D.E.A. - Dispositivi Estetici Acceleranti / Accelerating Aesthetic Devices) that accelerate the creative flow. The banners, the flyers, the interactive installations, but also the shop windows are conceived as "fragments of the work", essential parts for the creation of the artistic event. Ideation, planning, organization and realization of the work (design thinking) are the stages of the process that belong without distinction to all parties involved.
In the 2014, 2015 and 2017 editions, the luminous and pulsating sculpture "Cuore" ("Heart") was installed on monuments or in representative places of the city.
Since 2019, the "WebFaro" ("Web LightHouse") has been installed in the Spanish Quarters, the physical and luminous soul of the #CUOREDINAPOLI beat, connected to the #CUOREDINAPOLI App, which, through a progressive number identifier, allows the sharing, appropriation, as well as the 'dedication' of a single beat through social media.
Furthermore, the dissemination of the sign (the pixelated heart), spread horizontally and from below, led to the spontaneous adoption of #CUOREDINAPOLI as a city brand, in which the city recognizes itself in its contents and visual image.
The transformative intent of the existing perspective can allow defining #CUOREDINAPOLI as a profoundly pedagogical experience in a social key which insists on the various possibilities and opportunities for learning and social transformation through the process of "awareness" as the key to accessing a revolutionary change. A process that can be read through three large pedagogical magnifying glasses that are particularly significant precisely for adult learning: the alliance with the territory, cooperative and informal learning and Service Learning.
During the 3-4 months of stay in the area, the 150 students, after an initial phase of analysis of the data collected (e.g.: number and types of shops, roads, homes, associations, schools, parishes, road signs, habits, lighting, works of art, monuments and any other material and immaterial presence that characterizes the place and the community), act daily in the neighborhood to build relationships and trust with each individual subject, estabilishing individual and collective relationships, aimed at building common action priorities in the area together with traders, inhabitants and operators. The #CUOREDINAPOLI sign is proposed as a unifying sign of common requests and a large container that expresses and conveys the interests of that territory. The windows of each shop are rethought and rearranged together with the merchants, the visual communication is designed to speed up the connections between the economic, social and cultural interests of the place; the tangible and intangible heritage is enhanced through devices (digital or analog, ranging from the AR map of the neighborhood to window stickers, as valid as an installation that reveals the common sentiment or the mere amplification of the existing) that belong to the common sign.
The process of conscious reappropriation of space foresees a change that is possible only through an individual assumption of responsibility. The creative contribution given by each individual inhabitant (or merchant) becomes a design model, allowing for the enhancement of the specific features of a space (site specific) through the action on each individual person who lives there (people specific). Citizens spontaneously adopt the #CUOREDINAPOLI sign, recognizing its values. Taking care of one's own space and the public one, imagining aesthetic solutions for displaying products for sale, recovering normally abandoned corners of the neighborhood and giving them new meaning, organizing oneself to beautify the streets of one's neighborhood, are just some of the spontaneous actions carried out by residents and traders in the neighborhoods crossed by the #CUOREDINAPOLI flow.
Each subject intervenes in the process, bringing together their own skills, therefore their own expressive, creative, cultural and economic specificities, in the freedom to share them and put them at the service of the community and the project (e.g. pastry chefs, pizza makers, artisans who create new #CUOREDINAPOLI products, contaminating tradition with new and creative points of view; the tourist guide who proposes a #CUOREDINAPOLI itinerary; the old lady who cooks and offers dishes to those who attend the final event party).
During the five years in which #CUOREDINAPOLI has acted in the city fabric, thirty commercial establishments have decided to display the beating heart in the form of a sign on their entrance; dozens of cultural events have requested the moral sponsorship of the project; over 70,000 "fragments of artwork", in the form of pins, were distributed with unceasing demand; new productions have been dedicated to the sign: in 2017, thanks to a meeting with a local entrepreneur, a line of #CUOREDINAPOLI beer was born, currently in production for the national and export markets.
All editions of #CUOREDINAPOLI were realized with the support of the Municipality of Naples (in particular of the Department of Culture and the Municipalities), as well as with the support of numerous public and private subjects who have joined the project. Currently a pixellated red heart – installed on the Cumana train station of Montesanto in collaboration with EAV srl (one of the main public transport company) on 14 December 2019 to announce the VI edition – pulsates awaiting the realization of the party-event, which was scheduled for May 2020 and postponed due to the pandemic COVID-19. The 2023 edition will start again from the Montesanto district.
On the occasion of the 2019 #CUOREDINAPOLI Beyond The Lab edition, the project was co-financed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (today MIC), which selected it as the winning project (the only one in the tertiary education sector) of the "Take part! Act and think creatively" ("Prendi parte! Agire e pensare creativo"). The University of Naples "Federico II" and the Foqus Foundation have also supported the project.
On that occasion, the #CUOREDINAPOLI Beyond The Lab project envisaged the involvement of NEETs (20 young people aged between 18 and 29 residing in the Spanish Quarters), for whom specific workshops were created. In this way (learning by doing), they acquired skills useful for the development of a harmonious relationship between knowledge and know-how through a creative/manual approach, and new relational skills aimed at generating identity dynamics and growth of subjects on the level psycho-behavioral.
An ever-increasing demand for the adoption of the #CUOREDINAPOLI sign by Italian, European and non-European commercial activities (Naples, Paris, Amsterdam, Budapest, Tunis, New York, Osaka) has been consolidated through the diffusion of over seven thousand "fragments of artwork", including pins and the sign of the pulsating and luminous heart installed at the entrance to the shops.
The project is born and built for each edition in the spaces of the NTA laboratory in the Academy of Fine Art of Naples, involving all the students who, without distinction between the years of enrollment or course, work together with the teachers in the preparation of each edition of the project with a transdisciplinary approach. The School of NTA, in its innovative didactic model, abolishes the separation between the disciplines of the courses: the individual courses all merge into a single artistic training project which has the obligation to question the relationship between art and new technologies in the digital age. Therefore, disciplines such as multimedia design, theory of multimedia arts, new media art, digital photography, design of sound spaces, techniques of new integrated media, interactive software design, anthropology of complex societies and computer graphics are mixed, constituting a single teaching on doing.
The #CUOREDINAPOLI process is a flow of knowledge and heterogeneous cultures that is built through the active and creative participation of each individual subject: 150 NTA students, 7 teachers of theoretical and practical/laboratory subjects of the School of New Technologies of Art, the whole community that lives and works in that territory, the material and immaterial culture which characterizes the latter.
The innovative nature of the project consists in conceiving didactics as an artistic experience which is built daily (11 months each year) between students, teachers and the community which enters the artistic process as an active and creative part.
The tools used in teaching are accelerators of relational processes and activities preparatory to individual growth and that of the community. Brainstorming, pitches and turbo days allow each student and teacher to collaborate above all with those who appear more distant in terms of inclinations, interests, attitudes, methods, knowledge, in order to bring together experiential and behavioral areas far from one's own reassuring and usual field of action, implementing a constant comparison with projects that require a complex and transdisciplinary approach and simultaneously crossing different theoretical and practical fields, from sound to video, from graphics to photography to 3D, from analogue to digital. The Web and social platforms allow the continuation of the laboratory activity even beyond the hours set by the classroom teaching, favoring a constant update on ongoing projects and the sharing of ideas, opinions and materials. Since 2020, with the restrictions due to Covid-19, the laboratory has been active on the Zoom platform with the FluxH24 project, a virtual laboratory that has made it possible to continue working constantly on artistic projects and, therefore, on training.
The unconventional work tools that are used for research are the error (experimentation) and the hug (relationship).
All of this flows into #CUOREDINAPOLI. The improvement intent of the process is based on four elements: research of the best ways to respond to the needs of the territory; identification and re-evaluation of the critical issues inherent in that specific territory; presence and participation of all in the implementation; particular attention to the conditions of those who are "at risk of being excluded".
#CUOREDINAPOLI is a format that implies methodological replicability, but a diversity of contents that are directly expressed by the context in which one acts.
While the training and teaching model, research and analysis on a territory and its community remain unchanged, the data collected will always produce different approaches. Furthermore, these approaches require verification, adaptation and substantial modifications possible only from direct contact with the community. It means that each #CUOREDINAPOLI edition is profoundly similar in the methodology of the approach and profoundly different in the final results of the project, because it expresses and amplifies, highlights and enhances the specificity of the place in which the project takes place, making protagonists the subjects who live and work in that Neighborhood.
Therefore, the work is not an expression of a vision imposed by the artist on the world, but it is a people-specific response, therefore temporary and valid only for that community and at that particular moment. Losing the characteristics of universality or specificity linked to the place (site specific), it contributes to the construction of a shared and participatory vision of a given territory, of which it intercepts the pre-existing relationships or suggests new ones (relation specific). Therefore each aesthetic output reflects the identity of the place, its economic-social and cultural links.
The process does not envisage an audience of users, but co-authors who feed the flow, who act as active and interactive devices, who do not participate in the construction of the work, but are themselves part of the work. The practice of the party/event makes visible the emotional, physical and the exchange relationships of the territory and of the community that lives and works there.
The request to apply knowledge in real contexts allows, among other things, to combine the acquisition of knowledge with the development of transversal skills. In the co-planning process, but above all during the course of study at NTA, students train and develop skills such as: critical thinking, problem solving, team work, decision making, learning by doing, making mistakes as a tool of learning. However, we constantly reflect with the students on the fact that the approach undertaken, the laboratory work based on Problem Based Learning, does not always represent an effective training solution, on the contrary, it can be inconclusive without adequate planning and without taking into account of the commitment, constancy, strictness and self-discipline it requires in its implementation. The greatest challenge encountered is the change of perspective of both the teachers and the students.
The teaching methodology is a tool that allows you to operate on the territory and with the community in a horizontal way, building a collective "US" that becomes part of the process that leads to the development of the #CUOREDINAPOLI project.
The NTA laboratory is conceived as a Mobile Experimentation Laboratory, which moves from the physical space of the Academy of Naples and the virtual space of FLUXh24 (inhabited by teachers and students on the ZOOM platform) to the neighborhood where the project is to be implemented, involving institutions, associations, traders and inhabitants in the creative flow. Each subject operates according to their own skills and knowledge. The end is a relational work, an intense creative flow that culminates in the final party-event. What remains after the neighborhood is the sense of belonging, the enhancement of differences and specificities, the need to cooperate to build together a more ethical and supportive common territory.
In an era in which politics relegates culture to an increasingly marginal role, our experience favors a rebirth of knowledge on more equitable and creative foundations, constituted by the network of relationships and set up by the students themselves, since it is "sewn" on the basis to the interests of individuals. New technologies are constantly changing the economic and social balance of the world and the daily life of each of us. The advent of social networks has made words such as "contact", "sharing" and "exchange" very common, foretelling the birth of a world without any obstacles or the birth of that "global village" prophesied in 1964 by the Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan. We are aware that art and education play a fundamental role in the process of transformation of civil society and, at the same time, that the artist has an ethical responsibility towards the community because with his art he can activate collective behavior capable of modifying everyone's life. But the young artist we train also knows that he has to deal with, or collide with, the evident cultural regression that accompanies technological progress and that fuels the lack of interest in topical issues, from environmental sustainability to the general degradation of the Earth, from processes migrants linked to climate change to the growing intolerance and intolerance towards all types of minorities, up to the mortification of the civil rights of those who have less and less voice in a world governed more by the economy than by good practices. The artist always keeps an eye on the close interaction between geopolitics, geoeconomy and geoculture.
The data refer to a 2019 survey by the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Naples Federico II on the #CUOREDINAPOLI project.
For this purpose, approximately 450 questionnaires were developed and analyzed for data collection aimed at: a) Academy students; b) Neighborhood merchants; c) Tourists (local/foreigners). The sample highlights a predominantly youth participation of which 63% from Naples, 19.5% from the province of Campania, 11.3% from the rest of Italy and a presence of 6.3% of foreigners. 82.6% of the sample does not come from the Quartieri Spagnoli (the place where the 2019 ed. was made), therefore this demonstrates the degree of openness of the event to the outside. 62.7% of the interviewees take part in the event for the first time and 76.4% already knew it. 89% of the sample participated in the event in various ways and for various reasons: giving a hand to the students and the organizers, curiosity, personal interest and the pleasure of meeting new people, but also practical reasons, such as the willingness and attempt to grow one's business and evaluating the project as an opportunity. For 9.3% the participation of other colleagues/dealers had an influence. The project has produced an important output in terms of “change”, considering that 53% declare that the project has influenced their business, increasing knowledge of their business by 24.6%, with an increase in sales during the event for 21.9% and increase in annual sales for 11.4%, with the activation of new relationships with local merchants for 15.8% and with other merchants for 10.5%, finally relationships with institutions for 2.6%. For 4.4%, the project has created favorable conditions for carrying out a restructuring and new hires for 1.8%.
67.1% believe that associative projects are useful, in general, but the percentage increases in relation to the interest in participating in #CUOREDINAPOLI (93%) and 92% would be interested in participating again in #CUOREDINAPOLI.
