of Bologna. However, it was only when I met the political collective of Làbas that I found a space of engagement that was compatible with my idea of participation. In Làbas, it was for me finally possible to reconcile my ideas about what political engagement should be with practical actions.
Làbas was born in 2012 from the occupation of a former military barracks that the activists tried to save from degradation and turn into an ‘urban commons’. Within the barracks the political collective had set up a self-managed social shelter for migrants. In an environment ‘immunised’ from any form of racial, religious or cultural discrimination, migrants and asylum seekers were directly involved in the management of the shelter and supported in their strenuous process of social integration. These goals were pursued while trying not to replicate the logics of benevolence and welfarism of institutional services. On the contrary, the organisation of an Italian language school, of occupational workshops, and of events where migration policies and laws were explained were intended as measures to stimulate the direct activation of the hosted migrants on the social problems they were experiencing. These activities were inspired by the mutualistic logic of action adopted by the political collective of Làbas and aimed at promoting a real transformation of society. Alongside these projects aimed at ensuring a dignified reception to migrants, several other projects were developed to raise awareness of the issues of housing and migrant reception and to create a network between the local population of Bologna and the political activities of Làbas.
It took me some time to fully understand the complexity of the political community in which I had landed, but I could immediately recognise and appreciate the real freedom of engagement that was guaranteed to anyone approaching Làbas. Members were, of course, expected to share the basic values of anti-fascism, anti-racism and anti-sexism, but everyone was asked for an effort going beyond their own skills, attitudes and inclinations. This allowed me to put my skills at the service of a cause with which I fully identified. Among the many possibilities of activation existing within Làbas, I chose to channel my efforts into the cultural offer of the space and, together with other activists, I worked for the foundation of the self-managed social library of Làbas, which was created thanks to the donation of thousands of books by private citizens.
Within the library we started to experiment with a form of social activism centred on cultural issues. Indeed, the purpose of the project was not only to open an easily accessible reading room in the city centre nor to just make the procedures for lending books more flexible and less bureaucratic than in other libraries. The deepest intention was to use ‘culture’ as a channel to convey our ethical and political messages: the presentation of a book, the setting up of a photographic exhibition or the screening of a documentary became a means to denounce social injustices or to incite people actively to participate through self-representation and self-organisation.
The library was daily ‘lived’ by the activists and by a diverse population of users (for example, local inhabitants, migrants and students). This fostered the necessity to go beyond the often static and rigid organisational logics of traditional libraries: Làbas’ self-managed library was intended as a meeting spot where occasions of dialogue and exchange of ideas were promoted and where alternative forms to voice our dissent towards institutional approaches to migration and other social issues were explored. Our methods, practices and topics were, hence, already ‘political’ and the political nature of our cultural project emerged even more clearly when it became necessary to abandon the places where that experience had sprung up, following the eviction of Làbas from the occupied barracks in August 2017.
The absence of a physical space in which to follow up on the work already done with the library represented, even more than an obstacle, an opportunity to rethink and further reflect on the role of culture in our political activism. We started thus a reflection on the forms that our project could adopt in order to promote a cultural transformation of society while facing the lack of a fixed venue for hosting our events. The imaginative effort that the resolution of these difficulties required led a small group of eight people previously involved in the library to gathered around a table and found a new artistic-literary and editorial project. While maintaining our connection with Làbas, we wanted this new project to engage more with the city and to become a recognised actor in the local environment. In these circumstances the project of Quaderni Urbani (Urban Notebooks) took flight.
Theoretical assumptions, purposes and methodologies of the project
To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947, p 104)
From the start, Quaderni Urbani had the ambition to combine cultural commitment with social conflict. This seemingly belligerent goal, however, was not conditioned by ideological prejudices, but simply emerged from the experience of the obvious distortions of our surrounding social environment. The theoretical assumptions guiding our project were never explicitly discussed in the group, probably because they are considered a common and taken-for-granted cultural heritage for anyone who practises political activism. However, if asked to identify the most direct influences on our project, I would certainly find them in the Frankfurt School’s critique of the ‘cultural industry’ and in the theories on socio-cultural reproduction of inequalities elaborated – within the Marxist tradition – by the French sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron.
In the first half of the 20th century, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School understood that the reproduction of artworks made possible by new technologies (film and photography) (see also Benjamin, 1935) would place culture in a relationship of dependence on the newly emerging ‘cultural industry’ and the economic interests that drove it. The reifying logic of the factory, now applied to cultural products, would transform these latter into proper ‘goods’. The concept of cultural industry was coined to describe a process of mass production of cultural products, which after being ‘banalised’ by advertising communication, would be ‘administered’ to an audience no longer composed of passionate lovers of the arts, but of consumers. The dependence of the cultural work on the mass production system would have as a logical consequence, the emptying of that cultural work from any content that might be hostile to the interests of that system. Mass-produced cultural products would tend to be basic uniformity; they are ‘invariable entities’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947, p 131) that have no creative subjectivity and that encourage the acritical adoption of the consumeristic lifestyle. The power of control over consumers is exercised through entertainment, the quintessence of industrially reproduced culture: the fun and frivolity of the content sold by the cultural industry aim to dull the critical conscience of users in order to socially disengage them and to imprison them in indifference. The alienation from one’s own critical consciousness and the cultural homogenisation imposed by the cultural industry foster in individuals the conviction that the existing social order is ‘natural’ and ‘unmodifiable’. The removal of any resistance against a cultural system that reduces the work of art to a good of consumption and the removal of any claim against a social system based on class privilege that idolises profit are the ultimate goals of the cultural industry (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947, p 164).
The reflections of the Frankfurt School dialogue harmoniously with the study of the mechanisms of social and cultural reproduction conducted by Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1970s. Although the authors focused their analysis on the reproduction of inequalities within the context of formal education, their study (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) shed light on broader social processes. Bourdieu and Passeron stressed how the logic of action of both the educational institutions and the cultural industry entails a tendency towards acculturation that reproduces and crystallises the existing social order, while maintaining the inequalities that are structural to it. This reproduction of inequalities is achieved also with the help of devices of selection and censorships (advertisements, funding agencies, large editorial cartels) that are able to decide what is ‘culture’ and what is not. The culture that emerges from this process of selection has thus
