Faciamo pArte. School as we like it has involved Turin’s Istituto Comprensivo Salvemini in a participatory process to create a site-specific art project on the school’s façade.
Facciamo pArte (a play on words that juxtaposes the Italian “facciamo arte”, meaning “let’s make art” and “facciamo parte”, meaning “we belong”) is a project by Fondazione Agnelli and the “Salvemini” school, in collaboration with the Pinacoteca Agnelli art gallery. The project was inspired by the collaboration among the Exor group companies that participated in the Corporate Activities on Education training course in autumn 2021.
The initiative has sparked a participatory and multidisciplinary educational journey straddling architecture, storytelling, visual and performing arts, which developed between May and November 2022 by engaging primary school students and their teachers in a dialogue with an artist. The first step was a series of workshops focused on words and images, which started a process leading to the reclamation of school spaces and to the art intervention on the façade of the building, which has an impact on the whole neighbourhood.
Facciamo pArte integrated both educational and artistic processes. The former established a dialogue between students and artist Elena Mazzi, selected by Pinacoteca Agnelli to translate the participatory process into a site-specific art intervention. The children and their teachers (as well as their families in some instances) embraced the artist’s suggestions to play and think together about images and letters, with the goal of finding meaningful words for the school and its context, which would later be translated into visuals for the building’s façade by proposing rebus puzzles to make up and solve. At the end of the process, the noun “humanity” and the adjective “open” were selected for the installations. Having emerged from the dialogue between the artist and the students, these two words take us back to a dimension of inclusivity that is able to go beyond the school context, so as to embrace the entire community, spurring reflections on rights and citizenship.
Facciamo pArte: watch the video (in Italian).
The project also recruited a class of the “Colombo” junior secondary school to document the process. The log kept by class 3C is available here (in Italian).
The initiative is promoted by Fondazione Agnelli and Istituto Comprensivo Salvemini, in collaboration with Pinacoteca Agnelli.
