1 Introduction

In a European Union characterised by institutional timidity and economic polarisation, the flows of asylum-seekers are often described in terms of crisis (Musarò & Parmiggiani, 2017). Media communication and political actors have mirrored public anxieties and security concerns, endorsing emergency narratives, aggressive policing and militarised border control (Smets et al., 2020). Unable to engage with citizens’ concerns, they have helped to conflate migration with insecurity, creating a fertile breeding ground for xenophobic and populist reactions. Among the consequences of this ‘politics of fear’ are the increase of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties in Europe (Wodak, 2015) and a strong consensus on a hard line on migration, together with calls for even stricter policies.

In this context, the project “Atlas of Transitions. New Geographies for a Cross-Cultural Europe”, (Creative Europe 2017–2020) included theatres and cultural organisations, as well as a network of university stakeholders in seven countries – Italy, Albania, Belgium, Poland, France, Greece and Sweden – to investigate the relationship between migration and the performing arts. Adopting the methodology of action research, the project aimed both at sustaining an interdisciplinary reflection on how migration is framed and collectively imagined and supporting performative cultural practices able to enhance intercultural encounters and active participation.

This chapter explores how the different artistic activities realised during the project “Atlas of Transitions” in Bologna (Italy) promoted cultural and social change, in terms of both narratives built around migration and diversity and of practices of resistance and social inclusion facilitating intercultural dialogue among migrants and host communities. Our reflection focuses on a double level of analysis. From a methodological point of view, it investigates how, in the artistic projects developed in Bologna, the approach of action research sustained the conditions under which groups of people could organise and learn from their own experience while making it accessible to others (McTaggart, 1997). Indeed, this methodology shows a major shift in both reflections on knowledge production within and outside the academy and in the relations between research, action and social change. Secondly, our analysis focuses on the processes of audience development entailed by the project “Atlas of Transitions”, moving from the four different types of audience development in the cultural field identified by Kawashima (2006).

The method of action research and this particular approach to audience development will serve to investigate, inter alia, how a phenomenon such as migration can be de- and re-constructed using varied communicative codes, thus following a process of knowledge co-construction between artists, migrants, asylum-seekers and students. Hence, action research can be conceived as a collective process whereby participants aim to understand and improve specific social practices (Musarò & Moralli, 2019). Moreover, the audience-development approach can engage the audience of an artistic practice in intervening directly in the performance, contributing to the co-construction of new representations on migration. In so doing, both action research and audience development intervened in supporting a critical reflection by the participants, nurturing change and awareness about migration, linking the artistic, civic and political spheres (Mouffe, 2007). Finally, reflecting on how the Atlas project’s communication strategies and performative practices were planned to encourage mutual interaction between Bologna’s inhabitants, including locals and newcomers, while empowering their participation in cultural activities, we shed light on the capacity of participatory arts to disrupt the lines between possible and ‘impossible citizens’ (Vora, 2013)Footnote 1 and promote new forms of sociability (Glick Schiller & Caglar, 2016).

2 A Project in Multiple Transitions

Promoting cross-cultural dialogue in local communities through culture and the performing arts, the project “Atlas of Transitions” developed artistic initiatives capable of generating practices of mutual recognition and negotiation as well as spaces of encounter for people with different backgrounds. Thus, it supported common physical and symbolic universes capable of valorising diversity as a basis for cultural production and engagement. The project, coordinated by Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione (ERT), included 11 partners in seven countries – mainly theatres and cultural organisations: Cantieri Meticci (Bologna, Italy), Le Channel Scène Nationale (Calais, France); Tjeter Vizion Ngo and A.T.K. – Albanian Theatre Association (Elbasan, Albania); Théâtre de Liège and DC&J Création (Liège, Belgium); Powszechny Theatre (Warsaw, Poland); Motus Terrae (Lavrio, Greece) and Backa Teater (Gothenburg, Sweden). At the same time, the University of Bologna coordinated a network of seven universities and research centres on migration in the same countries (the University of Lille, the Centre of Migration Research – CMR, at Warsaw University, the University of Elbasan, the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies at the University of Liège, the University of Gothenburg and the National Technical University of Athens).

For the duration of the project, the collaboration between artists, researchers and practitioners assured the variety of the approaches adopted by each partner. The added value of the project consisted, indeed, in the variety of approaches adopted by the partners, which provided an opportunity not only to blur the boundaries between different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, urban studies, architecture, psychology and economics, among others) but also to review the preconceived opposition between theory and practice, between forms of direct intervention in the field and the mechanisms of knowledge construction. Therefore, since its very beginning, “Atlas of Transitions” implied various codes of expression, artistic expedients and flexible performative structures. It developed several interventions in different spaces and contexts, engaging local communities, migrants and refugees in different ways.

The multiple voices, disciplines and languages used by the project were directly reflected in the methodological frame adopted by artists and researchers: after a quick context analysis on migration and artistic experiences related to each country, every research group undertook an explorative qualitative analysis to examine the specific cultural activities developed in the first year by the artists involved in the project. This explorative phase provided an opportunity to understand communicative languages different from the codes usually adopted by academic research, opening challenging spaces of dialogue with the partners thanks to participant observations during the first months of the project (November 2017–May 2018) and 47 in-depth interviews with the artists and curators of and participants in the artistic workshops. Thus, it sought to answer the following research questions: How can we investigate a complex topic such as migration through artistic languages? In which ways can arts become symbolic and physical spaces of encounter and intercultural dialogue in European cities? How can cultural production directly involve migrants and asylum-seekers in active forms of participation while overcoming paternalistic forms of involvement?

After this explorative phase, the researchers and the artists together engaged in some experiments of action research. A fundamental point was to develop artistic practices intrinsically embedded in the specific context of intervention, capable of answering the emerging needs of that specific milieu. As a result, a mosaic of projects in transitions emerged, developed around different topics: from the concept of “refuge” – particularly important in Calais – to individual and collective identity – a relevant topic for the Polish context – and to the transformation of public space and revitalisation dynamics, as in the case of the city of Lavrion in Greece.

Although this contribution specifically explores the activities we developed in Bologna, in order to symbolically visualise the overall frame of action of the partners we decided to cite some of the artistic and cultural interventions developed in the other countries involved in the project. In Poland, for example, the performance “Lawrence of Arabia”, developed by Teatr Powszechny in 2018, proposed – through a theatrical telephone game – a unique reflection about identity, thanks to the cooperation of several groups: the team of artists and actors, foreigners living in Poland and researchers from the CMR. Furthermore, Strefa Wolnosłowa organised visual art and theatre activities for young artists of different cultural backgrounds willing to work with migrant communities living in Warsaw, as well as for all those interested in participatory and community arts. The workshops took place in various neighbourhoods of the city and resulted in a huge community of non-professional actors, musicians and young artists, leading to a second cycle of workshops and a final interactive performance. Similarly, in France, Le Channel Scène Nationale conducted, together with the artist Momette, two experimental creative workshops involving children and adults, locals and refugees, academics and artists in the city of Calais. The workshop implemented “The Great Hands Collection”, an evolving giant atlas of hands based on the handprints of all the people participating in the workshop, which generated travel stories and inner landscapes through drawings, paintings, soundtracks, images, photographic hand portraits and storytelling. Moreover, in 2019, during the multidisciplinary festival “A Taste of the Other”, Le Channel Scène Nationale invited people in Calais on a journey with an unusual itinerary, along which they could meet four people who had a certain amount of knowledge on the much-debated topic of migration: some were researchers (sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, etc.), some were artists living in exile (poets, actors, writers) and yet others involved residents or active members of various non-profit organisations. These “Incredible Paths”, directed by the artist Didier Ruiz, were an opportunity to create a space where short testimonials and concise reflections could shed light on questions raised by intercontinental migrations. In Sweden, Backa Teater and Twisted Feet realised a dance show with young people and amateurs. This project was dedicated to mirroring and celebrating encounters, courage and hope in the wake of policy measures on migration and displacement and harsh asylum laws. The following year, always combining professional actors with young non-professionals and based on the text written by the Syrian playwright, Adel Darwish, they promoted the performance “Hierarchy of Needs”, which focused on human relations, power and war. In Albania, instead, the performance “Sunflower”, organised by the A.T.K. Albanian Theatre Association and the NGO Tjeter Vizion, evoked migrants’ and asylum-seekers’ difficult journeys in search for a better life through a multidisciplinary artistic approach. Also in this case, the performance engaged non-professional and young artists and a cast including actors with diverse cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the team from Elbasan worked through different projects on return migration, an extreme actual topic for contemporary Albania. The important topic of displacement was also a reflection lens for the performance “Sortir du noir” (“Out of Darkness”) made by filmmakers Mary Jimenez and Bénédicte Liénard and supported by the Théâtre de Liège. This work focused on the reality of the migratory flow, mainly through the fundamental issue of the duty of burial, dehumanising those who lost their lives in the Mediterranean and bounding them to an endless exile. The performance was preceded by a series of workshops that involved students in dialogue with migrants, reporting their stories and life experiences and transforming them into narratives to be performed in the theatre. Finally, Motus Terrae, in partnership with the School of Architecture – NTUA and the local community, organised in Lavrion (Greece) a collaborative research workshop entitled “Monuments of Conflict & Convergence”. Combining an academic approach and tools of the young students at NTUA with the artists’ inspirational methods and gaze and the stories of the inhabitants of Lavrion, the team developed alternative and participatory urban maps, capable of connecting the past, the present and the future of the city.

3 The Project in Bologna

The project in Bologna developed around dual parallel lines of intervention. The first core of activities consisted of what, in the project, was called “The Art of Meeting”, a 3-year involvement of two artistic collectives from Bologna: Cantieri Meticci and ZimmerFrei. The first, Cantieri Meticci, is a theatre company from Bologna directed by Pietro Floridia. Since 2012, it has involved professional and non-professional actors from different countries all over the world. Cantieri Meticci works at the intersection between aesthetics and activism, carrying out large-scale theatre projects involving asylum-seekers, refugees, migrants and Italian citizens, often culminating in major artistic events open to the local community. The collective uses artistic tools to promote a public debate on the ongoing relations between newcomers and host countries, stimulating the public on the issues of migration and intercultural dialogue. Adopting a participatory methodology, Cantieri Meticci aims at maintaining a constant interaction with the local community and the spectators who take part in the activities, favouring the encounter between foreigners and citizens and aimed at widening spaces of social and political inclusion. Secondly, the theatre collective intends to improve participants’ artistic and cultural skills by supporting a company of professional actors/activists. Cantieri Meticci usually develops performances that shed light on issues such as exploitation, border control, human rights and intercultural relations, while maintaining a direct involvement of the public in the performance. As a partner in the “Atlas of Transitions” project, Cantieri Meticci developed a series of urban workshops included in the activities “The Art of Meeting”, as well as two performances for the two festivals (see Figs. 12.1 and 12.2).

Fig. 12.1
A photograph exhibits a man riding a bicycle on a stand on top of a table in front of a crowd of people. In the background, there are 2 people standing in a boxing ring.

“Autostrada del Sud”, organised by Cantieri Meticci during the festival “Right to the City”, 2018. (Photo: Paolo Piscolla)

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Fig. 12.2
A photograph displays a man lying on the floor and being poked with sticks by a group of people.

“The Nigger of the Narcissum”, organised by Cantieri Meticci during the festival “Home”, 2019. (Photo: Margherita Caprilli)

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The second collective which worked on “The Art of Meeting” activities was ZimmerFrei. ZimmerFrei is a group of artists working on public space through a combination of different languages, ranging from documentary films to video art, sound and environmental installations. The collective was founded in Bologna in 2000 by three artists: Anna de Manincor (filmmaker), Massimo Carozzi (sound designer and musician) and Anna Rispoli, who now works as an artist and director in Brussels. Within Atlas of Transitions, they organised three cycles of workshops dedicated to Italian and foreign teenagers (15–22 years old). These workshops consisted in the creation of sound, image and storytelling archives by intercultural groups of teenagers and youngsters (see Fig. 12.3).

Fig. 12.3
A photograph of 2 people lying on the ground. The person on the right is pointing towards the sky. There are several people walking in the background.

Scene from the “Saga” documentary, ZimmerFrei. (Photo: ZimmerFrei)

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During the workshops, the groups not only made contact with the video-art projects and the documentaries made by ZimmerFrei but also re-elaborated their own personal stories through an active involvement in the project. In particular, the three workshops – focused on storytelling, writing and image transposition practices – resulted in the realisation of a four-episode documentary entitled “Saga”. The documentary gave an alternative vision of the city of Bologna, thanks to the contribution of the young participants, who used different languages: from individual storytelling to scripted images, from interviews to open dialogues, from informal conversations to rewriting personal stories, all while passing through urban walks.

Another important part of the activities developed by ERT Fondazione, Cantieri Meticci and University of Bologna converged into the “Atlas of Transitions – Biennale”. These three international festivals (organised in 2018, 2019 and 2020) adopted an innovative approach to investigating the relations between arts and migration, involving both emerging and experienced artists from all over the world, often sharing the idea of arts as participatory and experimental spaces of collective expression. As the curator of the festivals advocates, they were “conceived to deal with the issue of contemporary migration from an artistic perspective, looking into its potential and encouraging interchanging geographies based on reciprocity and interaction” (Di Matteo, 2020, p. 26). The curator continues

promoting corporeal posture and narratives against the forms of sovereignty upheld by necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) – the use of social, political and military power to dictate how some people may live and how others must die – that are fully operative within the contemporary phenomenon of migration, means working openly to demolish the barriers that keep subjects divided and exposed to the logic of subordination (racial, sexual, cultural, economic), and to overthrow the expressive, cognitive and affective schema that keep us distant from each other (2020, p. 26).

The first festival, “Right to the City”, took place in the city of Bologna from 15–24 June 2018 and, inspired by Lefebvre’s ideas (1968), developed the theme of the right to participate and re-appropriate symbolic and physical urban spaces. The second festival, “Home”, animated the city from 1–10 March 2019 and dealt with the feeling of being at home or being away from home, starting with the reflection of Ahmed et al. (2003), who suggests the need to overcome a representation of migrants as ontologically uprooted. Based on a feminist and post-colonial approach, this perspective tries to challenge the ethnocentric narratives that depict migrants as an indefinite community that belongs nowhere and primarily to a Europe with borders remodeled and fortified by the Schengen agreements. These two conceptual nodes – the right to the city and the concept of home – were primarily used as narrative and design expedients to reflect on issues such as identity, belonging, inclusion and citizenship. Although influenced by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the third festival, entitled “We The people”, maintained the lifeline of some of the directions that nourished the entire course of the biennale: practices of sharing situated in the folds of urban life and artistic projects offering counter-hegemonic narrations, acting on the boundary between art and activism and discursive apparatuses that question marginalisation. The festival focused especially on the practices of listening, intended as the mutual encounter of bodies already headed towards new acts of listening. In this sense, the space of cultural production was intended as an agonistic space (Mouffe, 2007), made of relational poetics that decentre whiteness, heterosexuality and affective inadequacies.

On the basis of these premises, in the next sections we show how specific cultural activities developed within the “Atlas of Transitions” project in Bologna managed to foster alternative forms of participation of migrants and asylum-seekers, while deconstructing the conventional imaginaries built around the topic of migration. To do so, we propose an analysis of some of these artistic interventions through the dual lens of action research and audience development.

4 Culture as Deconstruction: The Potentialities of Action Research

Since the earliest stages of our investigation, action research seemed to be the most appropriate methodology not only to better understand the relationships between migration and the arts but also to develop other narratives on the migration phenomenon through the voice, ideas, creativity and skills of migrants themselves. Therefore, the action research was not limited to trying to blur disciplinary boundaries, enriching the perspectives on the phenomenon but also aimed to promote, in different ways, a mutual collaboration between artists, researchers and participants of the workshops proposed throughout the duration of the project. Hence, many of the projects mentioned are to be considered as the result of a process of cooperation that has alternated moments of theoretical reflection with performative interventions, research in the field with opportunities for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue, developing results in which the theoretical, practical and analytical dimensions are strictly interdependent. To do so, the projects developed within the “Atlas of Transitions” project included different tools, such as meetings between all stakeholders involved, interdisciplinary conferences and seminars on project issues, public debates open to citizens, art workshops, training in high schools and university courses and debates with the communities of migrants living in Bologna and its surroundings.

The rise of action research shows a major shift in both the reflection on knowledge production within and outside the academy and in the relations between research, action and social change. The term was introduced for the first time by Lewin (1946) to deal with critical social problems characterising the post-war period. His studies gave birth to a long research tradition about how this methodology can be used in organisations and can improve human relations in the search for resolutions of a common perceived problem/objective “by expanding the community of inquiry and interpretation to include the subjects studied” (Eikeland, 2006, p. 39). Although, over time, many other approaches emerged and action research was applied to different fields of studies and intervention (from development to technology and culture), a central aspect of this methodology is a learning experience and a collective process where participants aim to understand and improve specific social practices (McTaggart, 1997, also see Chaps. 10, 11, and 13 in this volume). This methodology is based on the idea that there is a link between knowledge and action. In this sense, participation intends to guarantee a democratic approach to the research, while action refers to the necessity for the research to be aimed at contributing directly to the change of a specific situation. Overcoming the dichotomy that usually divides action and research (Whyte et al., 1991), action research connects the concept of knowledge to everyday life practices.

In so doing, it tries to intervene in contexts of social injustice and exclusion, enhancing social relations and supporting a critical reflection by the participants. In the field of migration, for example, action research can represent a useful approach with which to both deconstruct the narratives conveyed by stigmatising media and political rhetoric and promote alternative imaginaries on this complex social phenomenon, challenging the oppressive mechanisms of representation and exclusion often reproduced by the media and the imaginaries they convey (Musarò & Parmiggiani, 2017). This means both addressing immediate needs and supporting a process of collective reflection on dominant structures in order to develop viable alternatives (Selner, 1997).

In the project “Atlas of Transitions”, the use of action research in performative practices (Leavy, 2019) thus aimed to challenge the stereotypical depictions conveyed by the distorted spectacularisation of contemporary migratory phenomena which crystallises the rhetoric of passivity of migrants and refugees (Ahmed, 2004) and influences public opinion (Horsti, 2019). Action research should also be effective in the practical everyday world through common working and learning dynamics. Within these processes, everyone should collectively work to reduce the sphere of power and control in everyday life practices, through both learning and self-reflection, due to a balance between action and research. This leads to the development of theoretically informed practices for all the participants involved, supporting a collective production of knowledge: “the distinction between academics and workers must not be taken to imply a distinction between ‘theoreticians’ and ‘practitioners’ as if theory resided in one place and its implementation in another” (McTaggart, 1997, p. 30). Furthermore, it is exactly through this process that stereotyped depictions of migration can be deconstructed and new imaginaries can emerge. Overcoming the positivist approach, action research thus involves people as “subjects” of the research, supporting “their capacity for self-reflection and their ability to collaborate in the diagnosis of their own problems and in the generation of knowledge” (Susman & Evered, 1978, p. 586).

The project “Maps of Transitions” proposed during the first Atlas Biennale “Right to the City” (2018) clearly showed this collective process of knowledge construction and its consequences at the level of change of social representations. This event was organised by Next Generation Italy, an association of second-generation migrants, which proposed a series of workshops addressed to asylum-seekers living in a reception centre in Bologna (Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, 2018). The aim of the workshop was to develop an urban itinerary based on the asylum-seekers’ daily life experiences of the city and the emotions (fear, happiness, doubts, etc.) they experienced in relation to such places. As a final outcome, the group realised a collective urban itinerary which ended in the internal cloister of the theatre Arena del Sole. Here, the participants in the workshops discussed their maps together with academics, experts and activists who were commenting on the “Hate barometer”, a tool used by Amnesty International Italy that served to monitor the language of political leaders on social media during the political campaign held in 2018 in Italy.Footnote 2 In this sense, “Maps of Transitions” – conceived as a mini-tour between geographical and linguistic maps – provided a platform for asylum-seekers, scholars, activists, immigrants and communication professionals to reflect on the relationship between fear and prejudice, while identifying the words for a more inclusive and welcoming society. Hence, in “Maps of Transitions”, the asylum-seekers were involved both in the development of an urban itinerary in the city of Bologna and in a mutual dialogue with researchers and experts in the field of migration. The result was an open discussion where different topics and concepts were disrupted and reframed: from hate speech to racism, from the accessibility of urban spaces to the reception system. The project “Maps of Transitions” unveiled the reflexivity in terms of the embedded subjectivities (Longhurst, 2009) of the participants taking part in action research, with a specific focus on knowledge construction. Drawing upon the post-structuralist approach, action research thus questions the participants’ principle of objectivity to valorise the existence of a plurality of standpoints. According to this vision,

any reality can only be decoded through partial and subjective narratives, whether those of the participants or those of the researchers (...), emphasising the influence of social relations and power hierarchies that exist in determining the coordinates of such narratives (Giorgi et al., 2021 p. 31).

The co-construction of knowledge was, therefore, guaranteed by a process of collaboration between all the participants. Here, two concepts become central. The first refers to “reflexive critique”,Footnote 3 defined as “the process of becoming aware of our own perceptual biases”. The second is “dialectic critique”, “which is a way of understanding the relationships between the elements that make up various phenomena in our context” (Winter, 1996, p. 19). These aspects refer to dynamic, interpersonally negotiated, processes of interpretation and their interdependence. In other words, the collaboration between participants was highly determined by their individual and social cognitive and interpretative frames which, consequently, influence the relations with others. It is important to highlight that action research does not refer only to the construction of scientific knowledge but also to practical knowledge (Shani & Coghlan, 2014). In this sense, “successful participatory knowledge production requires not only useful knowledge, but also knowledge produced through continuous negotiation within a specific context” (Caister et al., 2011, p. 25). In other words, knowledge production becomes a learning process.

A final important aspect was the conflictual dimension capable of subverting the dominant hegemony, namely what Mouffe (2007) defines as an ‘agonistic’ approach to cultural/artistic production. According to the political scientist, the negation of the controversial dimension typical of the liberal approach implies an idea of consensus based on reason, determining a political hegemony that creates, at the same time, the exclusion of certain groups. From this perspective, “critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by manifold artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (2007, p. 5). Hence, the arts can represent an important physical and symbolic space in which to start critical reflection and analysis (Leavy, 2019). In the particular case of the “Atlas of Transitions”, this agonistic approach was adopted to challenge specific images and narratives which dehumanise migrants and helped to deconstruct the pietistic imagination of migrants as “silent victims” (Chouliaraki, 2021). On the contrary, performing arts became “an authentic revolutionary alternative to the dominant language” (Fazio, 2001, p. 34), generating new and unexpected imaginaries and forms of mutual recognition. Within this context, action research allows not only the deconstruction of distorted images and the stimulation of critical reflections on these social inequalities; it also creates the possibility to develop collective experiments and new forms of dialogue and engagement of migrant communities, as we show in the next section.

5 Culture as Participation: Disentangling Audience Development

Recognising that there is variety in the activities generally known as “audience development”, Kawashima (2006) identifies four types of audience development in the arts. These include Extended Marketing, Taste Cultivation, Audience Education and Outreach (previously called Cultural Inclusion), each of which is different in terms of target, form and purpose.

Briefly, the author describes Extended Marketing as the skills and techniques – largely borrowed from conventional arts marketing – “targeted to tap into the pool of potential or ‘lapsed’ audiences who are basically interested in the arts but have just not had a chance to attend for a variety of reasons” (Kawashima, 2006, p. 57). It is thus mainly about identifying those non-attenders with a high potential for “conversion” and understanding the specific reasons for their failure to attend in the first place. In order to do this, it is fundamental to remove any tangible and intangible barriers to attendance or to give some specific incentives.

Taste Cultivation and Audience Education are mostly to enable existing audiences either to broaden their cultural scope (the former) or to enrich their arts experience (the latter). These activities start from understanding what else the existing audience might be interested in other than the current offers and giving them some additional or enhanced benefits. For example – as Kawashima reports – a Taste Cultivation project may take concert audiences to an art exhibition before the performance, whereas an Audience Education project would provide an opportunity for in-depth study into a specific aspect of the arts.

Finally, Kawashima describes Outreach as various projects to take the arts from their usual venues to places where those with little or no access to the arts live. They thus contribute to social policy in a broad sense through their artistic resources – for example, theatre companies taking participatory arts projects to a hospital and working with patients. Other targets may include the homeless, people in prison, those on low incomes or living in deprived areas and asylum seekers and refugees. Thus, we can see Outreach as a political category that leads us to deal with the concept of social inclusion and with the contribution of the arts to concern for excluded people and the creation of inclusive communities.

Following the different meanings described by Kawashima, the “Atlas of Transitions” project in Bologna was perceived and managed in terms of audience development; one of its main objectives was the inclusion of migrants and refugees through creative practices (also) in public spaces and peripheral urban areas. At the same time, this objective was, in parallel, included in communication strategies thanks to the launch of the web platform, pre-festival activities, the three editions of the Biennale Festival and the summer school held in June 2020. Considering communication more as a social interactive process, rather than a transmission of information, since the beginning the project focused on challenging the stereotypical narratives conveyed by the mediatisation of contemporary migratory phenomena, actively encouraging new ways of living public spaces and social coexistence between local citizens, migrants and refugees. Therefore, prior to analysing the various tools and actions experimented during the 3 years, it is essential to take into account the two main objectives that were identified when the communication plan for the “Atlas of Transitions” was defined. The first objective aimed to diminish the barriers that hinder “non-attenders” from being involved in cultural initiatives. To encourage a more welcoming environment, the project attempted to create conditions for them to participate, diversifying forms of dialogue (physical and non-physical), as well as using unconventional venues and public spaces, especially in suburban locations in the city of Bologna. This result also emerged from the surveys undertaken during the two international festivals organised in Bologna, where the majority of respondents answered that they were not used to going to the theatre regularly (for the “Right to the City”, 47.54% of the audience used to go to the theatre between one and four times a year and for the festival “Home” the figure is similar at 45.05%).Footnote 4

Since the first press conference of the project, the organisers highlighted the common objective of enlarging the range of the public while intercepting different types of non-attender, without forgetting their current audiences. On this basis, while ERT usually intends the press events of its annual cultural programme as institutional meetings, the press conference of the Atlas launch, as well as the subsequent festival launches, were public and widely advertised. To reduce the barrier between an institutional environment such as the Arena del Sole – a national theatre located in the centre of Bologna – and groups of audiences who usually do not attend this venue, invitations and press releases were sent not only to the press and media but also to a variety of non-profit associations, cultural workers, activists, socially engaged artists, high schools and universities. In particular, the collaboration with schools and universities in different cultural productions and projects led to the engagement of many students – participating also in terms of an audience: the category of “students” reached the highest percentage of participation during both the festival “Right to the City”, with a frequency of 49.18 and the festival “Home”, at 39.64%.

Furthermore, the three partners organised several meetings with local NGOs, social cooperatives and associations that work with migrants and asylum-seekers, managing reception centres or promoting activities of social integration, in order to better understand their daily commitment and to create meaningful, long-term connections between them and the project leaders. These meetings were considered as part of a fundamental approach, exploring the territory before the actual planning of the two festivals; they were instrumental in defining a long-term cultural strategy that goes beyond increasing visitor numbers. Finally, the programmes of the festivals were enriched by the presence of different artists coming from all over the world – from the “artivist” Tania Bruguera (Cuba), to performer Nadia Beugré (Côte d’Ivoire) and the Palestinian choreographer Farah Saleh. These artists collaborated together with Italian curators and artists on the main issues relating to the two festivals, namely the concepts of the right to the city and the concept of (not) feeling at home. The strategy at the basis of this choice was not to connect migrants with their country of origin or a spectacularisation of different cultural backgrounds but to work together on the temporary reappropriation of public spaces and critically reflect on artistic production from different perspectives, as shown in the two following examples. Moreover, cultural polarisation was also avoided thanks to the fact that most of the artistic projects were not directly and explicitly talking about migration but addressed interconnected topics such as borders, identity or the collective use of public space.

An experiment of audience development which particularly worked in terms of “extended marketing” and “outreach” was the performance “100 Pas Presque” (Almost 100 steps), which invited a hundred people of different origins, ages, genres, educational and professional backgrounds to participate in a series of dance and theatre workshops in order to create two collective performances during the festival “Right to the City” (2018). More specifically, during their encounters, the participants worked on the meaning of community, identity, diversity and body presence, in connection with different spaces and with the common aim to open new perspectives in innovative ways. The project was developed by the famous Moroccan choreographers and dancers Taoufiq Izeddiou and Said Ait El Moumen, who wanted to explore how performing arts can become a tool for the re-appropriation of space and intercultural dialogue without necessarily explicitly addressing these topics. The performances were realised in two different areas of Bologna: one in the city centre, the other in Piazza dei Colori/Croce del Biacco, a suburb characterised by social conflicts due to the coexistence of migrants hosted in the regional hub (hot spot) and the inhabitants of the neighbourhood – many of them retired, or unemployed – or families with low and middle incomes. The performance which initially consisted in a dance for 100 metres in a public space by the workshop participants, subsequently opened to the audience, making participants and spectators plunge into a rhythmic spiral capable of creating a discontinuity in the perception of the rhythms of the city. According to the choreographer, “dancing across 100 metres very slowly is likely to provide another way to occupy a place together, to ask questions about listening, about the other, as well as to revisit their relationship with time and space”. Thus, if the dimensions of integration, dialogue and interaction in urban space were not directly discussed by the choreographer or with the participants of the workshops – nor with the audience itself – they were conveyed through forms of communication that were not verbal but visual, making the performance more accessible to different kinds of audience.

Another interesting project was proposed by the Cuban arti(vi)st Tania Bruguera. The “School of Integration”, realised during the festival “Home” (2019), was conceived as a temporary school to experience other types of knowledge, history, skills, beliefs and customs, as well as unexpected connections between them and those of the hosting country. Through music, oral poetry, culinary exchanges, artisan workshops, etc., during the 10 days of the festival, the “School of Integration” activated a two-way model for teaching, in which the “foreigner guests” introduced the ‘local hosts’ to their traditions. Therefore, the role reversal between those who usually have to adapt to the host culture and those who are part of the host society was among the most interesting and innovative aspects of this project, challenging the usual political understandings – those of unidirectional “integration”. The lessons were all very different from each other: the Eritrean poetess, Ribka Sibhatu, gave a lesson about contemporary Eritrea, Larysa taught the Ukrainian rite of drawing and painting Easter eggs, while another association transformed the DAMSLab’s classroom – an artistic space managed by the University of Bologna – into an African tailoring shop, guiding the audience to experience the sewing machines and beautiful textiles with colourful designs. In so doing, the “School” encouraged a dialogue between ethnic minorities and inhabitants who met daily for an hour, with the aim of sharing their stories and producing “practices of difference” (Semi et al., 2009), suggesting that cultures are not coherent systems but are fluid and influence each other. Therefore, the “School” attempted to deconstruct “all social assertions of difference, highlighting its fortuitous, open-ended, unstable nature as it appears” (2009, p. 67). As a consequence, this project intervened in terms of audience development at a dual level. The first refers to “Extended Marketing”, as it involved those audiences who are usually excluded from cultural activities. The second refers to “Outreach” by bringing participatory artistic experiences within an academic space, thus contributing to its temporary re-signification. As Tania Bruguera explained:

School of Integration works on the intersection between art and pedagogy. Here, again, the project takes possession of a structure of power. Through my artistic work I always strive to activate processes from which local communities can benefit, so that they can become self-sustainable after passing the torch.

These two projects showed, therefore, how arts and culture can become an alternative form of participation (Merli, 2002). By selecting the stage venue outside the traditional places where culture is produced, involving the centre as well as the periphery, institutional places but also streets and reception centres – and encouraging the participation of different people – the project included and amplified the voice of those who are usually not heard. This was an experiment which showed how the performing arts can have both an aesthetic and a political value (Martiniello, 2016; Paltrinieri et al., 2020).

6 Conclusions

The project “Atlas of Transitions” displayed the transformative power of cultural production. It aimed to deconstruct Eurocentric narratives, promoting mutual recognition (Camozzi, 2016) and spaces of collective participation. Hence, the artistic interventions represented physical spaces and processes of knowledge that developed plural and various forms of conviviality.

First, the methodology of action research adopted in the project sustained continuous forms of social relations that gradually transform into learning relationships (Eikeland, 2006). Thus, the artistic workshops and events were able to promote forms of encounter and dialogue, supporting intercultural and intergenerational diversity as an inescapable source for the creative process. By creating plural and flexible structures, they involved various accounts and critiques, rather than a single authoritative interpretation (Zapata-Barrero et al., 2017). From this perspective, the knowledge of both the inquirer and the inquired was not excluded from an understanding of how knowledge was generated (Susman & Evered, 1978, p. 586).

In this sense, action research was concerned with change, not only at an individual but also at a collective level (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003). As the examples presented in this contribution have shown, a collective reflection on the modalities of deconstructing distorted imaginaries of migration through unconventional language and practices was the primary means to promote a change in these imaginaries (Foster, 1972; Moralli et al., 2020). In so doing, the project “Atlas of Transitions” has challenged the social conventions and power relationships that lay behind the ways in which different people were represented. Hence, the cultural activities were not only characterised by an aesthetic value but also by a strong political meaning. In this sense, they promoted a “narrative of change” (Wittmayer et al., 2019) capable of fighting “against pre-existing cultural and institutional narratives and the structures of meaning and power that they transmit” (Davis, 2002, p. 25).

Secondly, thanks to a collective effort in audience development, regarded not only as a possibility to broaden the audience of cultural productions but also as a form of direct participation of migrants, the project amplified their voices as individual subjects (Papastergiadis, 2012). As a result, the project became a space of dialogue, resistance and activism.

Drawing on these results, new research paths emerge. First, further studies are needed in order to understand the access to cultural production and consumption by migrant communities in the Italian context. While the number of artistic and cultural projects developed by migrants is increasing, artists encounter various difficulties in putting into action processes of counter-racialisation in contemporary Italian society (see Chap. 6 in this volume). Moreover, it would be useful to further investigate the transformative power of culture in terms of political participation and citizenship.