and mirrors the ideas of the ruling classes. It is a culture that legitimates only certain meanings, conceals the relationships of strength imposed by the system, acts as a symbolic and violent reinforcement of those relationships (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) and crystallises their alleged inevitability.
Although aware of the schematic synthesis of these reconstructions, I believe that for the activists of Quaderni Urbani, these theoretical assumptions maintain an indisputable validity in relation to cultural activism. From them we draw an historical and sociological lesson: that a considerable part of the cultural production of a society has always pursued the aim of reflecting the established order, then of reproducing and perpetuating in the arts, literature and in movies, a given model of society along with all its injustice and lack of equality. This awareness implies the recognition of culture as a label behind which there is often an ideological opportunism that is concerned with the preservation of the existing social order. The intention to enhance the ability of art and culture to be means through which to foster social change and question hegemonic thinking became the main purpose of Quaderni Urbani. In an historical period in which populist forces started to openly call for inhumanity, and closure of ports and borders, we worked towards a politicisation of culture. In so doing, we aimed to dismantle the alleged neutrality of dominant discourses, and to reveal their emptiness and their complicity with a system of structural inequalities. In this scenario, it became clear that the key element of our commitment should be the promotion of a counterculture and the support to those engagé cultural actors who intended to question and change the existing social order through their art. We turned our attention to independent publishers and artists, collectives of writers, and autonomous theatre companies, with whom we engaged in cooperation and mutual training, so as to create networks and extend in breadth and scope our cultural activism.
Decisions concerning the practices were crucial too. We wanted our political principles to show in the contents of our activities, but also in the practices and forms adopted by our project. We sought to avoid those organisational models in which cultural contents are merely unilaterally ‘transmitted’ from the artist to a passively receiving audience, as is mostly the case in school or academic contexts. Instead, we opted for activities where culture is collectively constructed, debated and resignified. This decision brought us to the organisation of open workshops ending in moments of final restitution in the form of collective exhibitions, readings or performances.
Our cultural activities were usually focused on a given topic (for example, the right to the city, migration policy) chosen from among those of greatest impact on the city and its residents or suggested by specific collaborations with artists or other cultural groups. Every decision on the work to be carried out is collectively taken, through weekly assemblies. The assemblies of Quaderni Urbani are self-managed and horizontal: this approach seeks to facilitate interaction and allows activists of heterogeneous cultural formation to ‘contaminate’ and enrich each other. Finally, we strive to avoid the elitist ultra-specialism that often distinguishes academic cultural events and we seek to maintain our activities free of charge so to ensure an immediate and extensive access to the cultural contents we create and share. In order to meet the necessary costs, we self-finance our activities by selling self-produced goods (such as hand-made notebooks) and by organising dinners based on a ‘pay-as-you-wish/can’ principle.
Since 2017, Quaderni Urbani has organised dozens of cultural events. Often, they have taken place in our spaces, but sometimes they have been organised elsewhere, even outside of Bologna. The horizontal structure of these events has encouraged the development of a critical and political knowledge among the participants and the creation of an authentically independent and free cultural offer. More specifically, we were able to group the organised events into three main types of activities:
•Open workshops: series of meetings through which the participants engage in a collective research/reflection aimed at critically assessing the complexity of a given social issue (for example, housing problems). This phase of collective reflection informs a subsequent practical phase of cultural and artistic self-production culminating in a final moment of open restitution of the results.
•Thematic readings: performative readings of classic and self-produced texts and poems on a given topic of political relevance.
•External collaborations: co-organisation of theatrical performances, presentation of books in the presence of authors, staging of artistic exhibitions in shared curatorship.
In the following section, a description of some of the events organised by Quaderni Urbani is used to exemplify these different practices.
Project work and its social impact
Metropolitan Snapshots (open workshop, May 2018)
In the past five years the city of Bologna has undergone a process of massive touristification. Investing in the food economy and in the transport sectors (and particularly in the expansion of the airport), the local government is trying to make Bologna an increasingly attractive destination for tourists. In so doing, the municipality has given ample room for manoeuvre to businesses ready to profit from the city’s transformation. However, no attention has been paid to the fact that an unmanaged tourist flow causes a radical alteration of the physical and social morphology of the city. In Bologna, in particular, this uncontrolled tourism has produced, in addition to the proliferation of countless boutiques and megastores where local food products are sold at embarrassingly high prices, a housing crisis of devastating impact. It is the city centre that has been mainly affected and particularly the student population, which is now struggling to find affordable housing due to the conversion into Airbnb lets of about 1,700 apartments (Gentile et al, 2018).
The open workshop Metropolitan Snapshots was Quaderni Urbani’s response to this housing crisis. The workshop aimed at being an opportunity to reflect on the ability of mass tourism to change the face of the city and to make an explicit call to act in the opposite direction. We found social photography to be the most incisive artistic medium for denouncing the transformation of the city, as well as the most effective means to win back the authentic soul of the city. We divided the work into three moments. First, we organised an initial briefing, in which we debated the narrative criteria of street photography, as well as its ability to portray the surrounding environment. Second, we organised a ten-day ‘photographic relay’, which saw the participants share and pass from one to another some analogue cameras. These were used to portray, in their neighbourhoods, places and people with a significant social or historical value. Finally, we created an exhibition of the shots that were also placed on a map of the centre of Bologna with the aim of revealing an alternative cartography of the city where the places of greatest social importance were highlighted.
The external participation in our first workshop and its results went well beyond our expectations. In fact, the workshop not only fostered the rediscovery of Bologna and its social composition, but also stimulated a collective process of awareness of the implications of our living together in a multi-ethnic and plural urban space. The ultimate message that our work aspired to convey? That travelling in already planned and standardised tourist routes means becoming part of a mechanism working for the profit of a few, as well as harming those who inhabit and animate the city every day.
Voices for Mediterranea (thematic reading, April 2019)
Over the past two years, every government that has ruled Italy has pursued migration policies centred on rejection of migrants and closures of borders. The adopted institutional policies have also promoted a criminalisation of humanitarian intervention. The numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have helped to mitigate the already dramatic death toll of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea have been threatened with financial penalties and criminal measures. This has led to the almost total disappearance
