An active group of young international professionals operating in Calabria with a transdisciplinary approach.
We operate in the voids of territories, physical and virtual, in search of abandoned shells, occupying space and assuming its shape. We want to create a new community by feeding through exchanges of knowledge in to inhabit a place temporarily but constantly. We are looking for a new model of living and working collectively, as opposed to a hyper-specialized and competitive work culture.
Local
Italy
Belmonte Calabro (CS)
Il Comuné di Belmonte Calabro
Mainly rural
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
Yes
ERASMUS
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No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Rita Last name of representative: Adamo Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Co-Founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Genova 17 Town: Amantea (CS) Postal code: 87032 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 348 526 8576 E-mail:ritaelvira.adamo@gmail.com Website:https://www.ritaelviradamo.com/
Le Seppie brings together two communities: one of students, academics, young professionals, and digital nomads researching into rural territories, exploring new ways of learning, and participating in cultures of conviviality; and one of the citizens of Belmonte Calabro (population 1,000) and Amantea (population 10,000), facing the realities of an ageing and decreasing population, an influx of migration, a reduction of public services and cultural welfare, and a negligence of built heritage. The exchange between communities informs the social and cultural initiatives and networks which define our project; the constellation of collaborations, in turn, contribute to our shared living ecosystem, Belmondo.
Our project is over six years ongoing, continually evolving to reflect the organic life of the context. The past two years have seen a formative organisation of practice, where the role of participatory education and cultural mediation has taken precedence. Through several programmes or strands of activity, we contextualise moments of knowledge exchange from the scale of lived experience to the territory.
In the current collaboration with School of Commons, we find ourselves oriented towards “investing in disused buildings, federating communities through open building sites, and initiating moments of conviviality to build a network of exchanges and practices on a European scale”. As co-organizer and this years host, the programme runs parallel to residencies of differing students and young professionals living together, as well as local events. The several strands of activities weave together complementary, creating hybrid forms of learning across different networks of actors and into our future endeavours.
Exchange
Youth
Active Participation
Transdisciplinarity
Conviviality
Our biggest sustainable asset is the realisation and promotion of the re-qualification of existing space, through daily living and working, for new and needed cultural purposes. Following our “needs”, we develop the places we in-habit, incrementally and together. This process is fundamental to developing a sense of care within new common spaces. Although simple in words, this approach in design and construction translates to highly enjoyed contemporary living and working spaces. Further, the approach to adaptively reuse structures and materiality offers up an alternative to the often misallocated funding and wasted resources in vacant development, synonymous with the region.
La Casa and La Marina Mercato are two projects exemplary of adaptive reuse as hybrid and lived interventions. Through our presence and contribution, the Casa and Mercato have become fundamental cultural spaces in the territory, confirming the need for continued development of the sites by larger regional resources. In the coming year, the Casa will receive an energy upgrade, furthering its sustainable venture. We will manage the temporary displacement of furnitures during the construction period, adapting to the flow of the development.
Students and young professionals present throughout the various programmes and residencies (i.e. School of Commons) are witness to these yearly developments, as it lays the backdrop to their collective living and working here. Here, genuine collaborations begin to tackle the difficult questions emerging from the rural fabric, when translating concepts between groups of different ages, needs, backgrounds and experiences. Framing sustainability within the rural, we work to produce curatorial outputs, such as exhibitions and talks, alongside conversations with students, about the changing nature of places and the hybrid roles of professionals in the built environment.
By promoting integration and development of the territory, we connect old and new inhabitants to reflect on how research, architecture, design, art and communication can be used to improve the shared urban fabric of a rural community. Conversely, conviviality and joy are provided by sharing and enjoying a rural, coastal landscape, away from the city, reconnecting with nature.
The materiality of our participatory interventions, co-run with architecture collective Orrizontale, primarily use wood, metal, and graphic work. Our Belmondo Experience programme draws on these natural and artistic assets, by offering co-living and co-working to promote the vitality of the Casa and the village. Importantly, we operate beyond simple touristic gain, by overlapping and mediating collaboration with other actors present, participating this year in joining farmers, hunters, craft technique demonstrations, food and art practice.
Our loose fit approach to construction and architectural development focuses on simplicity and on adaptation and usability. Benches, tables, screens, desks become relational devices through living together. The goal is less about moving furniture and more about how managing the Casa reflects a certain type of aspiration for the place and people in it.
Depopulation and physical territorial degradation make these places perceive as "empty" spaces, capable of attracting, thanks to their environmental and landscape factors, both those who intend to live them in temporary forms of experiential use, and those who aim for a residential and productive settlement. This is how these spaces have gradually become laboratories of experiences that do not contrast the advantages of the city, but try to combine them with rural, environmental, and socio-cultural values. The small daily moments and exchanges, often unforeseen, provide the basis for communication with our neighbours and immediate locals.
The foundations of the project are built on a diversity of narratives: initial work with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers set the tone for active participation and inclusion. When different actors come together, the collective knowledge becomes extensive. The ongoing student residencies continue this legacy of “hyper exchange” between the two communities, but over time periods of larger duration. When the students are present for longer periods of time, their independent projects expand beyond their original academic contexts and catalyse conversations and relations with all actors of the territory. This is fundamental in creating a place people wish to return to. An annual wine festival run by the village became a moment for exchange beyond what we anticipated: composed of guests from different programmes and places, the new community invited locals into the Casa, contributing to their own sense of belonging and role in the project.
Within participatory workshops (i.e. Crossing Cultures), we invite and collaborate with other practitioners and groups, allowing us and participants to explore several programmes (communication, process and construction, etc.) contributing to the same aim: the generation of moments or encounters that bring people of different ages and cultures together. This temporary action during the summer becomes a public venture. Where the physicality of these spaces already exists, they may be vacant or in lesser condition; before we seek out the means for intervention, we must support and enhance active communities that want to manage them.
On an international scale, Le Seppie offers educational workshops and residency programmes to involve students and young professionals; on a local scale, civil service (Servizio Civile) involves a network of youth from Amantea and Belmonte Calabro to make use of collective resources and facilities, to grow together within their community. Focusing on this local initiative, we have collectively realised a frequency of community events and moments that for us are more than just supplementary to our formal activities. Tombolata, football and DJ nights, etc.: moments not “designed”, but rather given the space to grow with time and interest of different actors.
Participants in civil service, collaborating with the collective on logistics and communication, enable us to co-run more robust programmes, but also find use of the project for their own group needs, like borrowing tools to build goal posts for football upon finishing the project Pupazza e Danze, a collaborative dance-led performance celebrating historical and contemporary female saints in the region.
HappyLab, involving craftspeople and children for a creative afternoon, was initiated by our local young associate, Safa. Friend of our organisation and former civil service colleague, Safa’s ongoing participation and support with this year's Crossings, together with her ties to local migrant families, led to her proposing the workshop, now a weekly occurrence. This extracurricular activity benefits beyond the individual and supports the community; and while we currently provide logistical and social support, mediating between actors and the local context, like all our endeavours, we wish to see these occurrences become autonomous within the community, and independent of us.
Our occupation and breadth of activity in the town has developed inter-cultural and inter-generational relationships that now see some of the locals, based on their own experiences, playing small but pivotal roles in our activity and working ambitions. Franco, a local builder born in the village, and whose formative education took place in the Casa (formerly a Convent) is a regular hand in our construction interventions, consulting him on both technical and agricultural inquiries. More so, his willingness and desire to convene and partake in these moments gives reason and voice to the wider network for how collaborative change involves different stakeholders. We understand this overlapping of inputs, has allowed locals too not just open up with us, but with each other.
Prior to Crossing Cultures 2022, we held a Tavolate (round-table discussion) for community engagement and inquiry, to share and give substance to our research and direction. Less about developing designs or programmes of activity, more to discuss were the bigger questions of: what, why, and how? Thoughts, histories, relationships and narratives are explored in this way. With this, we use these ideas and moments to inform the themes or artistic directions of workshops. “Non-work”, “Searching inhabitants of dynamic borders” that can “Deform” to and “Perform” within the territory, became subversive slogans used to both build-on knowledge gained and propagate new and hybrid reasons and methods to create action and commentate on common spaces in the context of rural/urban relationships.
Relationships with European actors such as London Metropolitan University, collaborating for over 5 years with the commune, have slowly developed into realising the studio environment as a place of community exchange, through the 2-month residency we call “Studio South”. A moment of “hyper exchange” between the two communities, one of our main aspirations and objectives, the residency serves as a catalyst for several of o
Adaptability and collaboration together forms, deforms and reforms the project of Le Seppie. From the early years of the project, disciplines of architecture, curation, and migrant studies were the first to inform the collective aims. Here, founders came together from local and international backgrounds, based in architectural research and curatorial practice, to work directly with refugees and asylum seekers. The initial structure oriented itself around space and community, at the intersection of architecture and social sciences. In the years since, different disciplines have been introduced with the energies of new people: art, construction, music, graphic design, food, performance, ecology and agriculture. Each constellation brings about new forms of interaction with each other and with the community, enriching the process with every new idea.
Previous members and collaborators continue to work with us, creating tangible connections both physically and remotely. From this, digital skills are often how we work and task our young collaborators employed by us through the national Servizio Civile scheme. Internal and external communication, organisation and logistics (particularly around events), website updates, content creation, applicational and administrative needs. These activities provide substantiation of our developments, but also serves as personal tools for reflection. If we learn something is important for successful operation, we see it as important to share. These skills are part of our and other modes of activism, that we hope become part of the arsenal young people can draw on in conjunction with their own interests and endeavours.
The boundaries delineating the ecosystem within which we act may be determined by the effects of globalisation and the depopulation of marginal areas, but the potential remains limitless. While contemporary practice tends towards prioritising the urban, we focus instead on these margins and their abundance of rural knowledge. From within this ecosystem, the work of Le Seppie seeks to combine radical visions with the concreteness of action: in radicality we can envision models of socio-ecological regulation and frameworks of life different from the current ones; in action we can create processes of place-making in the context of local resources and temporalities. The integration into and participation with the community is intrinsic to these processes, and together we can shift our thinking on the cultural margins.
We maintain a digital presence that reflects this hybrid and self-reflective methodology. Social media becomes a means to tell stories, an animated diary, a space to augment our new ways of living. As a tool of communication, its efficacy allows us to re-interpret small actions and forms of contribution, daily rituals that we share and expose to shift perspectives. Our visual identity must relate to both the local context and our own artistic and cultural endeavours within the territory, while encouraging dialogue and exposure of our and others activity. If the Casa is the backdrop, curation and mediation is our performance. Within this performative action, we share our time, our skills, and our experiences. In the form of creative practice, education and inter-cultural research become tools for place-making.
The aim is to create, through the direct experience conducted in Belmonte Calabro, a dynamic and open catalogue in which the design, artistic and craft practices produced can give shape to a new “toolkit” to allow the t
ransfer of self-study opportunities in our different areas of interest. We try to ask: “How can local communities be involved in the design, construction and management of their common spaces?” On the one hand, we seek to share disciplinary knowledge and cultural resources to improve the quality of life with an eye towards innovation; on the other, we seek to learn and develop skills to sustain this innovation among local active agents, particularly young people.
As with the Casa, a collaboration with the municipality and local craftspeople is a process that may be applied to other rural communities facing the realities of ageing and depopulation, an influx of migration, a reduction of public services and cultural welfare, and a negligence of built heritage.
As with all actors in the project, we aim to see inhabitants as collaborators beyond guests, and thus it is important to share both the practical and theoretical idea of being in “BelMondo” (the main physical and psychological framework of the project within the larger territory). This ranges from more natural considerations such as daily living, sharing space and resource to organising events with locals independently of us, the NPO. It serves as a useful consideration for practical concerns but interestingly also theoretically as a way to live and work together between people of differing levels of experience and understandings of a place. Students naturally develop relationships with young locals for playing football, driving around and exploring the territory, organising music events, often using spaces we work in or manage. Describing our relationships with actors this way allows for introducing the ideals and ambitions of the project, as we, the on-site NPO see and work within the territory.
Our “Glocal Tools” includes all those tools that define Le Seppie’s approach and express its values and identity. The name communicates the dual presence of the global and the local, part of a generation matured in globalization that wants to act locally, adapting its skills to the context to carry out appropriate actions.
We use:
Learning – By – Doing, Conviviality, Horizontality, Participation, Transdisciplinary, Experimentation, Self-Build and Re-Use as the basis for our actions.”
Work we undertake with the young people will be a means of actively learning how to approach making change and what tools and actors can play a role. A previous open-construction workshop that focused on the rehabilitation of a small garden space adjacent to the Casa, had sparked small imaginations for two of the young people we work with, when they asked, “Could we do something like this in Amantea?”
Although we are few in permanent full time members, we consider these actions as seeds for longer – term reflection (possibly longer than what is capable in this generation) on what collaboration like this could mean for the territory. These initiatives, although temporary, aim to deepen the values of equality among citizens through collaboration, integration and social inclusion through self-engaged research, group study, introductional training through workshops, and cultural exchange. Linking stakeholders is key to the success of such a system. Its work emphasises creating new links between unconnected stakeholders who are already inclined to improve their area but who require a network in order to create stronger opportunities.
Unfortunately, while many of the local youth are leaving their home region (Calabria) to bigger cities or other countries seeking better educational and professional opportunities, a new population from various African and Asian countries has landed on the shore, with a desire of integration, of contribution, which cannot be fulfilled due to a shortage of opportunities and innovation in most of the hosting regions.
Collaboration between global and local reality is necessary for a new development of rural areas. The latter is configured as a powerful agent for empowerment of local actors and the maintenance of strong culture. The creation of a new international community to collaborate and join the conservation and development of culture is able to bring economic and social well-being even in marginal realities, where education and exchange are the catalysts for wider artistic and communicative programmes.
As an education and learning initiative, Le Seppie has completed several projects in collaboration with local and global communities which have imbued both with a sense of belonging. In the case of the Casa, an abandoned monastery in a depopulating village becomes a cultural centre; in the case of the Marina Mercato, an abandoned marketplace becomes a public space. In both of these exemplary structures, adaptive reuse has been both a process of learning and the means to create learning spaces. In the coming year, we will be juggling the use of the Casa for residencies and studios parallel to its renovations. We will continue running programmes for the local families like HappyLab in the Marina Mercato. Finally, the summer of 2023 will see the research week, Crossings, respond to the various developments of the territory.
Another upcoming project, the "DigiPaese", works as a civil service project to bridge between the territory and new technologies, enabling the digitization of certain aspects of culture and at the same time bringing digitization to marginal areas, with particular attention to the territories of Amantea, Fiumefreddo, Longobardi and Belmonte. The project will be developed in several phases: the first phase will be the research phase, during which materials in the area of interest will be collected. In the next phase, the collection becomes a physical library; the location of which is still be decided. Finally, the actual construction phase will begin.
Archiving becomes an act which extends our presence and the future of the territory, and the meaning of our work. Over the years and into the ones ahead, the material we gather – whether it be crafts, photographs, music, recipes, plant taxonomies – become means for new, hybrid ways of practice.
