*The following texts were published in Italian on CheFare on 23.11.2020

 

Mentor: Lisa Angelini [botanist and agroecologist]
Nomadic: Chiara Pagano

[17.0°C outside. Alpine Botanical Garden of Viote. Just before the sun slips behind the mountains. 15 people on stage—perhaps a few more—watching and watching one another, keeping their distance. Diffuse but dim light. Trees—mostly pines; plants—around 2,000 high-altitude species. Rock gardens. Edelweiss. Peat bogs. Streams. Forests all around.]

Begin with the eyes. Let the gaze move along the boundaries, driven by a desire for curiosity.
That’s how it begins. L. leads us along the ridges of Monte Bondone with a story of the mountain. The garden is full of plants and flowers classified by families. There are others that escape naming, that for some reason have ended up elsewhere, far from their kin. Ecological corridors, connecting channels for animals and plants. Contaminated, interconnected species, joined and stitched together to form new, alien kinships, rethinking the pre-established notion of nature.
“The meadow you see was made by us; otherwise there would only be forest. Everything closes in here. It all closes in on itself and you lose species. You lose biodiversity; everything changes.” Hearing things like this hurts the heart more than it helps. Unthinking oneself. Being part of the audience, among those who listen to the making of the world as it unfolds before them. Arriving in a place where one can love everything one wants. Where one can choose to embrace the whole sky or the smallest, faintest stars. Where desire is free and the gaze meets no obstacles.
To know. To recognize. To recognize oneself with the eyes, the ears, and the sense of smell. To become part of a provisional assemblage.

 

Mentor: CAMPOSAZ [architects, 1:1 scale self-build workshop]
Nomadic: Cosimo Ferrigolo

There is a subversive potential in self-building; there is freedom in the design process and a satisfaction in the result that far surpasses that of purchasing. Building what you need, repairing what has broken, are revolutionary practices in a throwaway world, in an economy of delegation. When we arrive at the caravan, the vastness of the landscape around us contains only a few human interventions: an antenna, a sort of bridge in the middle of a waterless valley; behind a hill there is a mountain hut and a fence enclosing a ruin. The place feels welcoming, but around the Little Fun Palace headquarters all the elements are missing that would allow us to sit in a circle in the evening by the fire, to eat without getting wet; there is no solid surface on which to rest a bowl of hot soup, no shelter to protect us from bad weather. Many of us are unfamiliar with drills and circular saws. At first there is a great deal of apprehension from the tutors and considerable embarrassment on our part; nervous laughter and self-ironic jokes accompany every uncertain gesture. Soon, however, we gain confidence, once the first stools are tested. There is more silence, the kind that always accompanies concentration. Groups form spontaneously, and each person focuses on building structures that go beyond pure functionality to bring acrobatic fantasies to life.
Words among us become less and less fanciful; they are used to make decisions, to coordinate movements. At the end of the two days of work with Camposaz, we have everything we need, including structures for relaxation. We barely use them: with all the rain that came down, the small shelter was not enough. But since dust is both beginning and end, to conclude our Alpeggio we burned much of the structures to leave no trace, to keep warm.

Mentor: Riccardo Venturi [historian and contemporary art critic]
Nomadic: Michael Scerbo

The tent is damp. The morning air is crisp, and the skin is sensitive to the first rays of sunlight as they labor to break through the clouds wrapping the eastern peak of Monte Bondone. A landscape reminiscent of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, so much so that one wonders whether art truly imitates nature, and not the other way around. A mountain landscape in the making forms the backdrop to our thinking during these days of sharing. Hybrid, poised between nature and culture, it unfolds across layers of past stories and events, traces of the relationship between humans and vegetation. But not only that. As Riccardo Venturi, author and contemporary art critic, reminds us, the making of the landscape is also the work of meteors. So often ignored in art criticism of painted landscapes, and just as often perceived as a nuisance by those who scan the vault of the sky, meteors are not merely shooting stars, but the ensemble of phenomena that inhabit the heavens: clouds, rain, wind, tornadoes… aerial phenomena.
Meteors… a term that quickly came to inhabit our collective vocabulary, because, although circumstantial, they became travelling companions with changeable moods that significantly shaped our exchanges. Incidental to our attempt at sharing, meteors, like uninvited mentors, led us to practice a sense of precariousness, where all plans can fall apart, and so what do you do? Thus, between one activity and another, the question arose spontaneously: “What’s the weather like?”
A weather that begins as a feeling and turns into a science of approximation, where forecasting means scanning the horizon like a shepherd. Meteors are unpredictable: the more you try to understand what will happen, the more likely you are to end up soaked and probably chilled. They play and move as if nothing mattered: can we, too, become air?
The weather was fluctuating, and so were our moods. Perhaps, in the end, there isn’t that much difference between us and the meteors: after all, we’re all a bit weather-sensitive.

Mentor: Annamaria Ajmone [dancer and choreographer
Nomadic: Edoardo Lazzari

Lately I hear a lot of friends using the term “to trigger.” It bothers me because I can’t quite grasp its meaning. I’m not a nerd, and I’ve only ever dealt once with software that uses programming languages. I remember the trigger as a software tool meant to make numbers run at an implausibly fast speed. The reason I’m talking about this is that one of Annamaria Ajmone’s performances is actually called Trigger. So I decide to look the word up online to understand its exact meaning. In the field of electrical engineering it remains something I can’t make sense of, so I read: “trigger,” “to set off,” “to activate,” “to initiate.” The image I remember most vividly from Annamaria’s performance is her dancing figure that, with great nonchalance, leaves the stage and disappears into a forest. At the Viote it was exactly the opposite. Her appearance brought with it the appearance of the entire space around me. For the first time, after four days spent in that place, I became aware of where I actually was.

I asked Annamaria to perform for me. I asked her to dance a Tyrolean dance in the middle of the bushes in the Garden, while Cosimo and Carolina held her hands, hopping and shouting: “We accept her, she’s one of us! We accept her, she’s one of us!”And indeed that was exactly the case: I accepted her, and she was one of us. It may sound trivial, but it is astonishing to rediscover one’s own kind and to realize how generosity is the very first thing.

Mentor: Mattia Venco / Matenco [chef]

Recipe #02 – Trentingrana Fondue
Ingredients
1 L heavy cream
5 g cornstarch
900 g Trentingrana cheese

Method
Heat the cream in a small saucepan to 90°C. Add the cornstarch dissolved in a little water, whisking for a few moments. Add the cheese and blend everything with an immersion blender off the heat.

Scattered notes on a Nomadic School in the middle of the Alps
Nomadic: Filippo Andreatta

It took me three years to intuit that the Little Fun Palace caravan could become a school. An epiphany that waited three years to reveal itself: a nomadic school that moves, that changes according to where it is hosted. Just as the shape of the caravan changes depending on what it contains, a gathering, a DJ set, a film, a workshop, an exhibition. We brought it to 1,600 meters above sea level with a group of nearly thirty people, mentors and participants alike, who found themselves confronting how space produces reality. Space, first and foremost the Alps, which welcomed us and made us feel fragile. Because the words we use around landscape are the same, yet they change when spoken or heard in an urban, relatively protected environment, or on a mountain saddle where a cloud suddenly hits you in the face. But the landscape we kept talking about was also the materialization of a pathosformel. As if there were an unexpectedly shared essence across different forms, across different disciplines. Ideas not shared, yet identical ideas that take shape in fields radically distant from one another, as if they could cross opposite, far-removed domains without changing, finding inlets where recurring formulas of pathos can emerge. And so it becomes obvious that antispeciesism aligns with feminist thought and with the ideas of a botanist who, despite being able to compile a meticulous protocol in Latin and hand-draw a new plant species in ink, admits that her act of classification is, consciously, a futile pursuit.

And then there was the space between people. A relational space in which individuality merged with collective moments that exceeded the presence of the individuals themselves, expanding into the surrounding environment. But how impossible it is to feel isolated when immersed in a landscape. This very non-solitude became a plunge into the idea of unintentional design described by Anna Tsing: the overlap of all agents -human and non-human- that create the world, the landscape we inhabit and relate to. A landscape shaped by controlled individual design which, when combined, produces an entirely involuntary, unplanned effect—yet one of such formal precision that it leaves you speechless. Much like when you reach a summit, look around, and see the involuntary effect of which you yourself are a part.

Note: Little Fun Palace is now a Nomadic School that questions how space produces reality. Its aim is to experiment with new forms of learning and knowledge-sharing around the performing arts. By considering space and landscape as aesthetic territories with political implications, without using the language of politics, the Nomadic School problematizes the performing arts through interaction with other disciplines such as the natural sciences, architecture, and anthropology. Through workshops, experiments, encounters, and micro-performances, participants are encouraged to reconsider their own centrality and marginality within a shared space, such as the stage.