The project Il Futuro Era Ora (The Future Was Now!) is a pilot project for the construction of an active citizenship for the primary school Lombardo Radice known as Paravia School in Milan.
The Paravia school is an emblematic place for the Milanese and Italian context. Recognized as “the school with the highest density of non-EU students in Italy”, it represents the demographic change of the country, but also the progressive segregation of inhabitants of foreign origin taking place in some areas of the city. While immigration is a phenomenon typical of a world that proceeds due to unequal economic development, it is interesting to ask what are the values ​​that these new communities introduce in Italy and what impact they will have on the future of Italy.
The children with families of foreign origin who attend the Paravia school are in some way the representation of the citizens of the future. The exploration of new identities and social relationships is aimed at defining a more complex reality and identifying a new constitution.
Il Futuro Era Ora! proposes to the children of this school to enter a time machine and instantly find themselves in a society of the future as constituent citizens. Children are guided by artists, educators and specialists through a progressive path to live an ideal society that they experience, tell and represent, through various creative workshops. They explore a new identity and the relationship with space in a place where different laws are in force, they define an evolved society and the type of governance that leads it.
This future that instantly becomes a concrete situation, and lived on the front line, allows children to immerse themselves in a performative dimension, playful and lightened by social conditioning, to overcome the obstacles of ordinary life and to re-imagine and reconstruct a reality in their own image and similarity. This journey through time ends with the landing of children in the present dimension with the mission of spreading a model of life that they think is better.
The project is divided into four modules. Each module explores a different aspect of the future starting from personal characteristics up to the conception of a social structure:
– Module 1 explores a new type of identity through the creation of costumes of the future (costume making workshops)
– Module 2 explores the movement of the body in space and in relation to others through the creation of gestures and rituals of the future (movement and dance workshops)
– Module 3 explores the functioning of the ideal society through the imagination of a future reality (drawing workshops)
– Module 4 explores the governance of a future society through the drafting of a manifesto and the principles and values on which this society is based (writing workshops).
At the end of each module, a “postcard” is created, in the form of a photo or video message, which the children send to those who have remained in the past dimension and which tells and summarizes the experience lived in this new dimension. The journey comes to an end with the publication of an abecedary book on the gestures of the future: Abecedario dei gesti del futuro.