Young people create a geo-emotional map

The “City Telling” project opened the art museum in Bologna to new groups of visitors. And some 25 young people in the Pilastro neighbourhood discovered new forms of artistic expression. But it was a tough process according to museum educator Ilaria Del Gaudio.

The Pilastro neighbourhood is situated in the Bologna suburb of San Donato. The population consists almost entirely of refugees from the former Yugoslavia, mainly from Kosovo and Montenegro. That someone from this neighbourhood should take the trouble to visit Mambo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna is not an everyday occurrence. Ilaria del Gaudio from the museum’s educational department decided to try to change things. The result was the “City Telling” project – an interactive urban map and a tour through Pilastro where the youngsters talk about their own lives.

Finding young people to take part the greatest challenge

The first challenge, and in many respects the most difficult one, was finding youngsters willing to take part, Ilaria explains. “We imagined a fairly mixed target group with participants of different ages and different backgrounds. Initially we ran the project ourselves by presenting it to people in the neighbourhood and via the schools. But it soon became apparent that something was not working. People were not interested in taking part and many were suspicious of the museum staff”, Ilaria explains.

Closed society

Pilastro is a closed society where people stick together. They all know each other and the recipe for winning their trust proved to be time and physical presence in the neighbourhood. “People were suspicious of me because they did not know who I was. But a good way of creating trust is to walk about the streets and talk to as many people as possible; not just about art. I started going to Pilastro almost every day for two weeks. In the end most people knew who I was. They started asking me questions and helped me when I lost my way.”

Local youth group the key

The most important key to Pilastro’s youngsters was contact with Katun, the local youth group that supports young people who want to create their own art and culture. Katun is divided into two sub-groups, one working younger teenagers up to sixteen and one working with people up to the age of 25. All the members are refugees or the children of refugees.

A group of about 25 youngsters

Thanks to Katun they managed to recruit the first group of participants consisting of about 25 youngsters, mostly boys. The first meetings were held at the museum where the participants could get used to the notions of modern and contemporary art and various expressions of art: performance, video, photography, etc. The participants chose somewhere in their immediate surroundings that they wanted to present. This place provided the starting point for a work of art.

“We worked with a large-scale map of Pilastro. The youngsters chose their favourite places and together they created a persona, an intimate path through the neighbourhood, with stopping points at the places they wanted to present. One of the boys chose the park where he experienced his first kiss. Another chose the football pitch where he meets his mates every day. The participants presented their places to us based on their own artistic expression.”

Polaroid camera fascinated

One of the participants chose to write a song dealing with the Pilastro shopping centre while another expressed himself with the help of photographs taken with a mobile-phone camera. Several of them chose to use a Polaroid camera. “Many of the participants chose to write about their places in the form of stories. The youngsters come from a tradition where people do not use writing except in official contexts.

Collected on DVD 

Some forty photographs, a song and three written narratives resulted from the first production period. Everything has been collected on a DVD where there is also a video documentary of the project. “We had a film-maker with us at all times during the project, even at the most difficult moments when the youngsters had very little confidence in the staff from the museum.”

The next stage of the project is to create an interactive map on the Internet based on the participants’ walk through Pilastro. More or less corresponding to Google Maps, this will be a geo-emotional map in which the participant’s chosen sites are marked and their artworks are presented. “We want to involve more people from Pilastro”, Ilaria says. “We have good relations with people in the area but we want to deepen these relations, for example by working together with whole families. We also hope to be able to make contact with youngsters who are not involved in Katun.”

Only one girl

Only one girl took part in “City Telling” all the way through to the final production. It took a while for Ilaria and her colleagues to understand why this was. “In the family traditions of many people living in Pilastro, girls marry early. We had several girls taking part at the beginning but after half the time they had almost all disappeared. We did not understand why this was until other youngsters told us that they had got married and were therefore not allowed to carry on with the project by their families.”

How can one deal with this?

“I should like to know more about the girls’ world and what their lives are really like. One needs to talk to people in the neighbourhood in order to gain an understanding of what I can do – and what I cannot do!”

A continuation

“City Telling” is Mambo’s first attempt at reaching out beyond the schools and the museum’s own premises in its educational activities. The project will be continued but Ilaria hopes also that the museum’s entire operations will develop on the basis of the experience gained from the project.

“In the future we hope that the museum will develop into a place for exchanging information and experience and a starting point for all sorts of processes. We want to continue working with the people of Pilastro and we are very pleased that Katun contacted the museum themselves after the first “City Telling” project and expressed a wish to continue the collaboration.

Mårten Janson