ExSA Futura - Sharing the Culture of Care and Commons
ExSA is a project of social cohesion around the reappropriation of a neglected heritage, a former prison in the historical neighborhood of Bergamo. Civic engagement and Urban Commons’ care are at the core of our initiative. Since 2015, ExSA offers itself as a platform to experiment with shared management, informal cultural production, and cohabitation with differences.
Regional
Italy
Municipality of Bergamo
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): SO.NO. - SOCIETÀ NOMADE Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Francesca Last name of representative: Gotti Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: PRESIDENT Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Vicolo Sant'Agata, 21 Town: Bergamo Postal code: 24129 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 366 318 8645 E-mail:societa.nomade@gmail.com Website:https://exsa.it/
ExSa is a civic engagement project around the reactivation and requalification of an abandoned heritage site in the city of Bergamo, the former prison of Sant’Agata in the historic uptown. Appreciating its architectural potential as well as the building's legacy as a place of contentious memories, ExSA was founded in 2015 not only to return a forgotten medieval structure to its citizens, but to confront difficult historic arguments of partisans and their imprisonment. Furthermore, ExSA shaped up to become a place of encounter and social exchange, a base to foster both amatorial and professional cultural activities in an informal environment. In 2017, the building was awarded the status of “Bene Comune” thanks to an agreement between ExSA and the Municipality of Bergamo to collaborate on this urban common.
Since its inception, ExSA has hosted hundreds of initiatives: performances, educational programmes, study groups, kindergarten visits, exhibitions, artistic residencies, markets. Access was open to all and for free (through the support by members of the associations involved, national funding programs and local sponsors). But mainly, the activities attracted citizens from a diverse anagraphic range and cultural background to engage with the place, and further, fragile individuals of the community were involved, among them people with special needs, refugees, and former inmates who held key roles in the set up of interventions, as well as guarding and reception duties.
Through ExSA’s, a project fostered and supervised by the association “Maite”, various social groups and informal networks have inhabited Sant’Agata, following an experimental system of horizontal management that foresees shared responsibilities and personal initiative from all protagonists. Learning from the experiences, a new association was born within ExSA: So.No - Società Nomade, to carry further and consolidate the project, and to continue spreading its practice, approach and citizen network.
CONTENTIOUS HERITAGE
URBAN COMMONS
SHARED MANAGEMENT
FOSTERING RELATIONSHIPS
SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
The base of the project ExSA is the reuse of the neglected complex of Sant’Agata: a 14th-century asset, originally built as a monastery and later on transformed into a prison. In itself, the building is a powerful example of how heritage can be adapted: albeit being abandoned in 1980, the building has shown to be flexible for various uses and re-occupation. Inside, the building is split into a plurality of smaller rooms with a strict distribution system – challenges in the requalification of the building, yet an influential factor for the choice of activities and the hosting capacity, defining a “manageable'' small to medium scale.
From the beginning, the project has been supported through memberships in various associations involved, by donations of citizens, and by local companies providing monetary, materia, and knowledge resources. The project has also received public fundings, for instance as a winner of the call ANCI “SINERGIE” in 2019. The refurbishment of the rooms, including electricity systems, furnitures and technical equipment, was realized with direct and indirect contributions, creating opportunities for the exchange of expertise (thus combining the spatial upgrade with an horizontal learning process). In accordance with the Municipality, heating and electricity have been activated on-demand, avoiding excessive energy spending; this in line with the awareness-raising work about resource consumption through users’ accountability.
ExSA has grown thanks to the work of many volunteers and civic engagement – their invested time has been compensated,if not monetary, at least with services, training, spatial resources. The project serves as a platform to allow small and spontaneous initiatives to grow and to find new collaborations and resources through exchange. It finally gives the opportunity to individuals with special needs or excluded by the labor market to get new expertise and confidence.
Sant’Agata is a majestic 14th-century artifact, a courtyard building made of multiple floors with its main architectural and pictorial features intact: the arches of the original porch, vaulted rooms, facade and window decorations, paintings in the old church. To reopen meant cleaning and decluttering to bring back a usable and healthy state. In 2015, Sant’Agata was made accessible to the public for the first time, even prior to the 30 year long period of neglect, it had always been in exclusive use (first as monastery, later as prison).
Sant’Agata has hosted numerous performances to enhance its spatial qualities , creating immersive situations and envisioning ways to experience the space collectively through all the senses. Among those events were the festival ORA D’ARIA (2015), the itinerant performance ODISSEO - IL FOLLE VOLO by DESIDERA TEATRO (2016), the lyric FESTIVAL DONIZETTIANO (2017), the performance IL MATTO by MASSIMILIANO LOIZZI (2018).
While performative interventions have created physical dialogues with the space, art installations have tested new spatial configurations, always maintaining a light and reversible character, in a double narration between memories of the place and the new content hosted. Some of them are: RESET CLUB GAMeC PRIZE (2018) a group of artists intervened with site-specific installations under the curatorship of the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art; with INVISIBLE (2018) the artist Pierpaolo Lamieri resurfaced from the walls of the cells the engravings left by prisoners; lastly, the permanent exhibition SE QUEI MURI (2021), curated by ISREC and realized by SO.NO - SOCIETÀ NOMADE, represents a presidium to safeguard the original state of the prison while narrating the history of anti-fascism in Bergamo.
The variety and quantity of the events reflects the possibilities offered by the place and its management and mirrors the high demand for a space of spontaneous aggregation and informal cultural production.
ExSA’s backbone is its organization in a form of experimental shared management. At first, the activities were coordinated by MAITE, organizing the citizens' proposals. Both groups and individuals received support from MAITE to implement and communicate their activities, along with material and social resources.
In 2020, ExSA changed to a system of fully shared management of its spaces and projects, facilitated through the newly founded daughter association SO.NO and testing it through the funded BA.BE.LE project. Numerous groups of artists and socio-cultural workers were selected through an open call and invited to use ExSA’s spaces on a daily basis for research and productive activities. Each “resident” has been given a set of keys to access ExSA autonomously; all participants were asked to collectively take care of the building, including the cleaning, material replenishment, organizing visits and public events. Since then, SO.NO. has remained curator, mediating also the relationship with the Municipality.
In the areas of care and maintenance, the project benefited also from the support of temporarily employed individuals, including individuals with special needs (in the autism spectrum), young NEET, and former inmates. The majority of protagonists involved in ExSA are aged between 17 and 35, yet the public events and workshops have always attracted a broad spectrum of visitors. For instance, the repair workshop MARKETLAB (2016-2017), the winegrowers’ fair VITE IN LIBERTÀ (2019) or the storytelling meeting OLTRE I MURI (2017) have created occasions of intergenerational exchange among youngsters, adults and elderly; whereas, the KINDERBAR (2018-2019) has provided a safe and accessible environment for kids and their families to gather in an intimate setting. All initiatives, residencies, or events (including the permanent exhibition SE QUEI MURI), were free of charge and have occasionally been supported by the profits of temporarily arranged gastronomic services.
First and foremost, ExSA managed to create a space for informal gatherings and activities, freely accessible and open to multiple uses amid an urban context strongly characterized by tourism and downfall of non-commercial spaces. Groups like TEATRO CHAPATI (theater company, members under 35 y.o), LOUDY BOYS (music group, members under 20 y.o), OMERO (association for visually impaired), have inhabited ExSA, profiting from the wide set of possibilities to use the space while sharing them with the rest of the community through joint events.
Other initiatives have demonstrated how ExSA and its members provide ways to innovatively educate and train: FUTURA DIGITALE (ongoing) will be a project to train young NEET women in digital skills, to help them enter the labor market.
The high demand in Bergamo for a space accessible to multiple informal groups on one hand, and the complexity to develop such an organization on the other, led to the formation of a team to continuously accompany the project: young experts from different backgrounds and shared ties to ExSA, came together in the association SO.NO. - SOCIETÀ NOMADE, supported through the national funding program ANCI SINERGIE. Through this programme, the group developed an educational project - SAPERE (IN) COMUNE - concerning management, cultural production, urban policies, aiming to foster specific skills through meeting with experts in an open participation process.
SO.NO. will continue sharing its knowledge and experience around shared management, not only to gradually hand over the management of ExSA to an independent group of citizens, but also to set an example for others for endeavours of spatial requalification in the city.
Throughout its development phase, ExSA has fostered a strong collaboration between multiple local actors. Artistic companies and informal groups, universities and high schools of the city and its province, as well as third sector entities have all contributed to the organization of events, educational programmes, events, educational programs, and other activities.
Thanks to the national funded programme SINERGIE by ANCI, ExSA has collaborated for one year with SPAZIO13, a reactivated school in Bari. The program consisted in a peer-to-peer learning experience, with reciprocal visits of the two joint-projects and of related others in the regions, mediated meetings between municipality representatives of Bergamo and Bari, and on-site workshops about management, networking and independent cultural production.
Working with the Municipality of Bergamo is one of the core principles of ExSA. The project has been legally recognised by the Municipality and, albeit never being funded, it has been exempted from paying rent. The dialogue has been especially intense with the councillorships of Urban Planning, Heritage, and Youth Policies: the negotiation with the Municipality, and the social and cultural value of the project, has led to the recognition of the former prison as an Urban Common. In 2017, in fact, the Municipality adopted the national Common Good Regulation and signed the Collaboration Agreement with ExSA, as a first project ever in Bergamo. This step paved the way to new agreements with other regional associations.
The importance of advocacy on Urban Commons and on informal cultural production, pushed SO.NO - SOCIETÀ NOMADE, currently representing the project ExSA, to join LO STATO DI LUOGHI: the first Italian network of reactivated socio-cultural hybrid spaces. This represents a meaningful occasion of exchange and collaboration with other entities on a national level, both to bring support outside and to bring knowledge and expertise within the city context.
Both during the phases of inception and implementation, ExSA managed to bring protagonists from various disciplines together and to unite their different professional backgrounds to create a shared vision. Greatly benefiting from the team members' experiences in the fields of art (with a strong representation of the theater and performance sector), advocacy, pedagogy and education, architecture, and curatorship, it was the high level of exchange and communication that ultimately facilitated the great success of the project. With the help of the project’s communication designers, all voices were heard, translated into productive processes, and later broadcasted to the community.
The working process was facilitated by the presence of social mediators and curators, all members of the project, who have been observing and listening to the different voices throughout the process, leveling wants and detected needs; equal importance has been given to both active members and engaged users. In this sense, the division of responsibilities within the group, the time dedicated to intense meetings and confrontations, to collecting feedback and to engaging through different tools and languages (communicative, performative, spatial, digital, ethnographic), paid off immediately.
The team’s broad spectrum of expertise in art and education paired with the specific professional tools in the disciplines of architecture and curatorship allowed for the development of innovative cultural programmes and experimental educational workshops. The outcome, including various formats (ranging from specific courses to more generic events) managed to live up to the previously defined educational purposes in a way that was simultaneously aspirational and entertaining, amid the carefully curated re-discovery of a long-forgotten place that rose back to life for giving inspiration and atmosphere.
ExSA has experienced both success and challenges: while the participation and public attention has always been high, the management of the space has led to numerous difficulties. Over the past two years, ExSA has introduced a system of experimental shared management. The objective of the project clearly outlines the co-habitation of different cultural “residents” in the building, as well as its shared care and maintenance responsibilities.
Shared management implies collective decisions on the programming, calendaring, cleaning, restocking, and funding, and a shared responsibility to implement them while simultaneously developing individual and collective activities. This form of management clearly marks the most innovative aspect of our project, yet it further needs strengthening and redefinition on points such as social engagement, heritage management and cultural production, as well for its potential to be reproduced in other sites and different protagonists.
In this perspective, the training program BA.BE.LE and SO.NO embody a radical model of peer-to-peer education, combining academic expertise, professional knowledge and activist practices of inclusion, through an experimental tactic of testing-by-doing.
Equally relevant is ExSA’s initiative to advocate for the acquiring the “Common Good Regulation” in Bergamo, displaying their activities inside the spaces and their long-term commitment, contrasting a lucrative approach of other “temporary re-activations”. Like many other cities, Bergamo is increasingly governed by top-down, tourist-oriented and exclusive initiatives when it comes to the reuse of abandoned heritage spaces. With this in mind, ExSA has focused not solely on producing socio-cultural activities, but also on promoting the culture of Urban Commons, of citizen empowerment and of subsidiarity, thus creating a slow, respectful, inclusive, self-supportive alternative when approaching cultural production and heritage management.
In summer 2021, ExSA, and more specifically the association Maite, signed another collaboration agreement with the municipality of Bergamo, this time for the urban common of LA CROTTA, a neglected park in Bergamo's upper town. Through the agreement, the association pushed the Municipality towards socio-cultural activities inside the park. As in Sant’Agata, the group developed a program of initiatives, specifically addressing children and employing people with special needs in roles of maintenance and safeguarding the place that was established under the name PROGETTO CASE.
CROTTA allowed for testing a smaller, shorter-term version of ExSA in an open-air space; its great success led to a repetition in the following year. Despite differences in duration (4 months program vs long-term) and spatial typology (a walled park vs a building), the developed methods for Sant’Agata proved to be a good base for the development of Progetto Case. The type of agreement signed with the Municipality ensured a safe regulatory tool; also, the network of people and the inclusive system of collaborations led to a variety of activities, addressing a broad public.
Naturally, some approaches had to be adapted to the specific condition presented by the demands of a summer open-air programme. Yet the experiences from the past years helped to better deal with unexpected issues.
Therefore, what ExSA would like to pass on and spread, is a) the practice of negotiation with the Municipality in acquiring the use of spaces, with attention to Urban Commons’ policies; b) the method of experimental shared-management applied throughout the collective activities, accountability, planning, sharing of material, human and intellectual resources; c) the “Call for Needs” survey, developed to understand the needs of the territory; d) the peer-to-peer educational program tested during BA.BE.LE, as the learning-by-managing part of the reactivation process of a space.
ExSA could be described as a sequence of micro projects - most of them of spontaneous nature and without predefined structure. Rather, the projects are identified by individual and specific approaches. Altogether, they compose a macro project, which analyzed retrospectively outlines a mixed practice-theory based methodology.
The sequential approach through which ExSA has been shaping up to become a macro project can be summarized as follows:
-reopening and maintenance of the neglected building (the former Sant’Agata prison, Bergamo), to offer guided tours and to inform citizens about the place and its history;
-organization of temporary cultural initiatives, to test light uses of the space and its potentialities, and to engage with multiple groups and actors coming from the social and artistic field;
-negotiation with the Municipality to obtain the best regulatory tool to use the building, ensuring its accessibility, safety, and multiple functionality;
-testing various forms of economic sustainability, from memberships, to sponsorships, public fundings, resource and material sharing;
-realization of “Call for Needs”, namely open calls targeting individuals and groups between 18 and 35 y.o., living in the city and province of Bergamo, to understand the need for spaces for social gatherings and informal cultural production;
-testing long-term professional and educational uses of the building, in a system of cohabitation, through shared management.
Amid an increasingly globalized world, the challenges for communities and local players become more complex by the day, as rapid developments (such as digitalization, climate change, and a growing social inequality) put pressure on all members of our society, yet in particular on the more fragile groups.
Therefore, ExSA seeks to tackle some of these challenges along different areas of interventions, seeing itself as a mediator between those individuals that are most affected by the rapid changes or are in danger of exclusion through their fragile state (as kids or people with disabilities) and inclusive strategies. Furthermore, ExSA is concerned with the problematic of abandoned urban commons and spaces of cultural heritage, as those spaces greatly influence the civic sense of identity and belonging, sensations that are greatly linked to the strength of communities in confronting global challenges.
Therefore, the ExSA project focuses on a) the development of educational and inclusive programmes and b) the provision of spaces of encounter for those programmes to happen. In doing so, it unites two elements in fragile condition and turns them into qualities. In the requalified places of the historic places ExSA, encounter and learning spaces are formed and permit access to education, specific training, and further allow for inclusive practices and employment concepts. Simultaneously, abandoned spaces of cultural and heritage value are reused, requalified, and made available to the public – not only on a symbolic level, but also amid the contemporary debate on scarce resources, ExSA has proved to be an example of success.
In its current project phase, ExSA reviews the subsequent development process of the past years: this entails to collect feedback from its various members and collaborators as well as to critically systematize the different issues addressed within the project, to be able to share a valid toolkit. This toolkit would include an in-depth analysis of the methodology developed and insights on specific topics, such as the Urban Commons policy, the shared management experiment, the “Call for Needs”.
This review is fundamental, as the building might be undergoing severe transformations in the coming years. The will, also expressed by the Municipality, is to preserve the social vocation of the building and its role as testimony of a collective historical memory. To do so, it is fundamental - in the coming year - to structure and consolidate a shared management that doesn’t require the presence of SO.NO. on site: this will mainly concern the use of the rooms as spaces of work and creation (currently occupied by the “residents”) and the administration of the exhibition SE QUEI MURI (that risks limited accessibility if none will be paid to keep it open). In this sense, we are now starting a first phase of analysis of the project, of its limits and strengths, meeting “residents” and producing a report of their experience and their will concerning the space. We are now elaborating a proposal to be submitted to the councillorship, to approve and formalize our role as mediators between the Municipality and the future users for the next phases of the building.
In parallel, as SO.NO., we are starting a collaboration with another association, KARAKOL, active in a more peripheral area (the neighborhood of Celadina). The goal is to support their project, on a political and programmatic level, by sharing the experience of ExSA - in a similar way to what has been tested during BA.BE.LE. - helping in the choice of the best regulatory tool.
